Comparing Data Sources on Police Use of Lethal Force

• In Event: Data Sources on Police use of Force and Deaths That Occur in Police Custody

Abstract

The study of lethal violence by police has been hampered by significant problems with respect to the collection of data on this population of events. Prior studies have found that the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Death in Custody Reporting Program suffer from substantial underreporting and lack sufficient detail of homicides committed by police. Using data from our Ohio pilot project we compare the coding of police homicides across multiple data sources, including department-level police records, Ohio Department of Health records, the Supplementary Homicide Reports, the National Center for Health Statistics, and newspaper articles. We are creating a clustered random sample of homicides in 34 counties in Ohio, 1959-present, including police involved homicides. We present our preliminary results from the more than 400 such homicides from the first three decades of our study.

Authors

• Randolph Roth, Ohio State University

• Wendy Regoeczi, Cleveland State University

• Rania Issa, University of Akron