ArticleInjury epidemiology2025
Validating open-source data on fatal police shootings against self-reports from a national sample of police agencies.
Article in Injury epidemiology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveBecause of limitations to government data on police-related violence, researchers commonly use open-source data as the best approximation for studying the prevalence, causes, and prevention of police killings and other police-related violence in the United States. However, the comprehensiveness and accuracy of these open sources are not well known.
methodsWe compared fatal police shootings in three commonly used open sources to self-reports from a national sample of 573 U.S. police agencies from 2015 to 2019. Using ANOVA and regression methods, we assessed patterns of agreement and discrepancy by open source, year, and agency characteristics. We also examined media reports to assess factors contributing to overcounts in open sources.
resultsAnnual open-source counts were higher or lower than self-reports for 5%-9% of agencies depending on year and open source. Discrepancies varied between open sources but not consistently across years. Discrepancies were more likely and greater in magnitude for large agencies and state police, with less consistent evidence of regional variation. Overcounts in open sources appear linked to incidents involving multiple police agencies, multiple shooters, officer deaths, unclear causes of death, and agency misidentification.
conclusionsOpen-source data on fatal police shootings are largely accurate but should be used cautiously, particularly in agency-level analyses. Coordinated efforts by police agencies, open-source compilers, and other researchers could potentially improve the accuracy of data on fatal police shootings.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.