A Comparison of Official and Media Counts of Police-Caused Deaths

• In Event: Theoretical and Methodological Advances in Policing I

Abstract

Recent years have seen a marked increase in scholarly attention to the use of deadly force by police officers. One aspect of this increased attention is research that addresses the macro spatial correlates of citizen fatalities at the hands of the police. One challenge to this line of inquiry, however, is that scholars have for many years noted and documented the fact that official counts of citizen fatalities are notoriously flawed. One solution to this problem that some have proposed is to use media accounts of police-citizen interactions in which citizens die to develop a more comprehensive accounting of these sorts of deaths for use in research. This paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of one specific media-based data set of police-involved citizen deaths and compares it to the most often used official count of these sorts of deaths, the SHR data collected and kept by the FBI’s UCR system.

Authors

• David Klinger, University of Missouri - St. Louis

• Brian Karl Finch, University of Southern California

• Audrey Beck, San Diego State University

• Kyla Thomas, Center for Economic and Social Research

• Richard Johnson, Dolan Consulting Group

• D. Brian Burghart, Fatal Encounters Dot Org