Toward a National Database of Officer‐Involved Shootings

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12178
• Author: Geoffrey P. Alpert
• Published date: 01 February 2016
• Date: 01 February 2016

POLICY ESSAY

MICRO-ECOLOGY OF DEADLY FORCE

Toward a National Database of

Officer-Involved Shootings

A Long and Winding Road

Georey P. Alpert

University of South Carolina, Griffith University

The plea to develop a national database on police use of (deadly) force or officer-

involved shootings (OIS) is not new, and Klinger, Rosenfeld, Isom, and Deckard

(2016, this issue) do a good job of tracing the history of the requests and responses

of practitioners, politicians, and researchers to the lack of information. Following their

discussion of the prior attempts to put a national database together, they remark that,

“In sum, the available data and prior research do not permit sound assessments of the

social determinants of the use of deadly force by the police, racial disparities in police

shootings, or the degree to which racial disparities may reflect biased or discriminatory

police behavior. Therefore, they cannot serve as a reliable guide for policy evaluation—a

pressing public priority in light of recent events.” By moving beyond the original request

for a simple national reporting of OIS, they accurately identify the needs and benefits of

such a reporting system. The purpose of this policy essay is to provide some background on

the dismal state of affairs related to our knowledge of OIS, trace the government’sattempts

to compensate for it, introduce the importance of the media, argue along with Klinger et al.

that such a database will improve our understanding, and take a giant step to assist in the

reduction of unnecessary or unreasonable OIS.

Many law enforcement agencies train their officers to be accountable and “own” each

round they fire. The strange case of the shooting of Miriam Carey by police in Washington,

DC, and Chief Cathy Lanier’s promise to have each officer explain the decision process of

firing each round is an interesting example (Montgomery, 2014). If the officers did explain

why each round was fired, the details were never released to the public. This OIS was

complicated, involved several jurisdictions, and was explained to be different and did not

Direct correspondence to Geoffrey P. Alpert, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of

South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208 (e-mail: geoffa@mailbox.sc.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12178 C2015 American Society of Criminology 237

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 15 rIssue 1