Assessing Data Completeness, Quality, and Representativeness of Justifiable Homicides in the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports: A Research Note

Do Sheriff-Coroners Underreport Officer-Involved Homicides?

“…Despite reporting indicating that political pressure may play a role in medical examiners’ official determination of officer-involved homicides, to date there is no evidence on whether counties with a sheriff-coroner may be more prone to undercounts or misclassification of such deaths (10). Although all medical examiners and coroners may face political pressure from the public and special interest groups, sheriff-coroners may feel particular pressure from law enforcement in ways that would downwardly bias counts of officer-involved homicides.…”

“…The FE is arguably the most comprehensive data collection of officer-involved homicides in the United States. The FE collected data on 23578 officer-involved homicides from 2000 to 2017 with a methodology combining Freedom of Information Act requests, crowd source efforts, and internal validation checks (10,11). A validation study found FE captured 98.5% of preselected cases, more than other open-source data sets and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Violent Death Reporting System (15).…”

“…The SHR defines justifiable homicides as “the intentional killing of a person without evil design and under such circumstances of necessity or duty as to render the act proper.” Within this category, we consider the incidents classified as Felon killed by police as officer-involved homicides. It is well known that these incidents are underreported because many agencies fail to report and because reporting agencies underreport the number of incidents (10). But it is unclear whether reporting of incidents to the SHR would be subject to pressures from sheriff-coroner’s offices, as incidents are reported directly from law-enforcement agencies as part of a larger crime reporting project to the FBI’s uniform crime reports system.…”

“…Finally, the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) collected by the Centers for Disease Control uses a combination of sources to identify an International Classification of Disease, Tenth Revision ( ICD-10 ) code that specifies “deaths by legal intervention.” These incident counts are found to be even lower than both the ARD and SHR counts (7). More recent estimates, comparing these official sources with an online database of officer-involved homicides called Fatal Encounters (FE) finds that official sources—depending upon the circumstances of each homicide—typically undercount annual homicides by anywhere between 50% and 250% (10).…”

The Crisis of Social Institutions and Police Homicides: The Adverse Effects of Low Institutional Control

“…These data sources include counts of justifiable homicide from the Uniform Crime Report's (UCR) Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), Bureau of Justice Statistics' (BJS) reports on arrest-related deaths, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), Fatal Encounters (FE) (e.g., a journalist-led effort to identify public records and media coverage of police homicides), and the Washington Post (WP) database on fatal police shootings (see Banks et al, 2016;Edwards et al, 2019;Feldman et al, 2017aFeldman et al, , 2017bJohnson et al, 2019;Schwartz & Jahn, 2020). The existing federal data sources on police homicides (SHR, BJS, NVDRS) have been widely criticized for their incomplete and unreliable coverage of these homicides due to nonreporting, underreporting, and misclassification (see Finch et al, 2021;Fyfe, 2002;Loftin et al, 2003;Williams et al, 2016).…”