Crowdsourced police shooting data: What we know and what we’re missing

• In Event: 4260 - Race/Ethnicity and Police Shootings: Call for New Data and Knowledge

Abstract

Since 2015, The Washington Post has been compiling and publishing rich data on fatal officer-involved shootings (OIS). Sociologists and others have increasingly begun utilizing these data to answer various research questions, including the role of race/ethnicity in deadly force incidents. Unfortunately, the data do not capture OIS that do not result in death (incidents that still qualify as police use of deadly force), making their use for research purposes akin to assembling a puzzle with only a fraction of all the pieces. In the present study, we examin trends in available fatal and nonfatal OIS data from a sample of major cities in an effort to illustrate (1) how many OIS we miss by only analyzing those that result in fatalities, and (2) how different the answers to many basic questions are when we examine fatal OIS vs. all OIS.

Authors

• Justin Nix, University of Nebraska Omaha

• Kyle McLean, Florida State University

• Jeff Rojek, Michigan State University

• Scott Wolfe, Michigan State University

• Geoffrey P. Alpert, University of South Carolina