Using Public Health Datasets to Analyze Legal Intervention Shootings

The proposed study takes advantage of two data sets commonly used in public health research but seldom used to study LIH: the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), which has a unique combination of size, scope, and contextually rich detail regarding LIH, and the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) Emergency Department and Inpatient datasets, which provide nationally-representative data on non-fatal police shootings as well as information on such factors as victim co-morbidities (e.g., mental health, substance abuse). The proposed work directly addresses the NIJ’s call for “studies that examine the characteristics of firearm violence, including the differences in fatal and non-fatal firearm injuries” and has the potential to produce novel, policy- and practice-relevant findings about where and how often police shootings occur, how often they prove lethal, and for those that do prove lethal, what situational characteristics of the incident cluster into distinct categories of lethal intervention homicide. ca/ncf