RT Article
T1 Assessing Data Completeness, Quality, and Representativeness of Justifiable Homicides in the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports: A Research Note
JF Journal of quantitative criminology
VO 38
IS 1
SP 267
OP 293
A1 Finch, Brian Karl
A2 Thomas, Kyla
A2 Beck, Audrey N.
A2 Burghart, D. Brian
A2 Klinger, David
A2 Johnson, Richard Ronald 1937-
LA English
YR 2022
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1884549187
AB 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.
K1 Supplementary Homicide Reports
K1 Officer-involved homicide
K1 Uniform Crime Reports
K1 Police homicide
DO 10.1007/s10940-021-09493-x