ABSTRACT
Introduction: In the United States, each state sets its own standards for its death investigation system. These may require independent medical examiners and coroners or allow for the sheriff to assume the role of coroner. Motivated by the well-established fact that counts of officer-involved homicides in official data sets grossly undercount the number of these incidents, we examine the possibility that different death investigation systems may lead to different death classification outcomes. Methods: To examine the potential differences in officer-involved homicide underreporting by presence of sheriff-coroner and violent death type (gunshot, intentional use of force, pursuit, or other vehicle accident), we compare ratios of incidents from both the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Supplementary Homicide Reports and the restricted Multiple-Cause of Death files from the National Vital Statistics System to the Fatal Encounters data across coroner contexts in California between 2000 and 2018; we quantify differences descriptively and examine bivariate tests of means. Results: We find significantly greater underreporting of officer-involved deaths in sheriff-coroner counties in both official data sets for all incidents compared with non-sheriff-coroner counties, independently of the period considered. These underreporting differences in the National Vital Statistics System are robust to restricting to gunshot and intentional use of force deaths, the type of incident expected to be less prone to misclassification in that data set. Conclusions: Officer-involved death underreporting in sheriff-coroner counties necessitates further scrutiny. Disparities in officer-involved death reporting suggest political pressure may play a role in classifying deaths.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: The most widely used data set for studying police homicides-the Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) kept by the Federal Bureau of Investigation-is collected from a voluntary sample. Materials and Methods: Using a journalist-curated database of police-related deaths, we find the SHR police homicide data to be substantially incomplete. This is due to both non-reporting and substantial under-reporting by agencies. Further, our inquiry discloses a pattern of error in identifying "victims" and "offenders" in the data, and finds that investigating agencies are often incorrectly listed as the responsible agency, which seriously jeopardizes police department-level analyses. Finally, there is evidence of sample bias such that the SHR data system is not representative of all police departments, nor is it representative of large police departments. Conclusions: We conclude that the SHR data is of dubious value for assessing correlates of police homicides in the United States, as all analyses using it will reflect these widespread biases and significant undercounts. Analysis of SHR data for these purposes should cease.
