A Replication Study of Police-Involved Homicides Employing Unofficial, Crowd-Sourced Data

• In Event: Police Violence and the Role of Police Accountability

Abstract

Studies of police-involved homicides have traditionally employed official data sources such as the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. The validity and reliability of such official data sources have increasingly been called into question in recent years. At the same time, a number of so-called “crowd-sourced” data sets have been constructed, largely by amateurs or journalists to record such homicides. To evaluate the reliability and validity of these crowd-sourced data sets, we replicate a number of studies of police-involved homicides, and then update them using both official and crowd-sourced data.

Authors

• Matthew Renner, University of California, Irvine

• Peter Augustine Hanink, University of California, Irvine