Do Sheriff-Coroners Underreport Officer-Involved Homicides?

Abstract

Introduction: In the United States, each state sets its own standards for its death investigation system. These may require independent medical examiners and coroners or allow for the sheriff to assume the role of coroner. Motivated by the well-established fact that counts of officer-involved homicides in official data sets grossly undercount the number of these incidents, we examine the possibility that different death investigation systems may lead to different death classification outcomes.

Methods: To examine the potential differences in officer-involved homicide underreporting by presence of sheriff-coroner and violent death type (gunshot, intentional use of force, pursuit, or other vehicle accident), we compare ratios of incidents from both the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Supplementary Homicide Reports and the restricted Multiple-Cause of Death files from the National Vital Statistics System to the Fatal Encounters data across coroner contexts in California between 2000 and 2018; we quantify differences descriptively and examine bivariate tests of means.

Results: We find significantly greater underreporting of officer-involved deaths in sheriff-coroner counties in both official data sets for all incidents compared with non-sheriff-coroner counties, independently of the period considered. These underreporting differences in the National Vital Statistics System are robust to restricting to gunshot and intentional use of force deaths, the type of incident expected to be less prone to misclassification in that data set.

Conclusions: Officer-involved death underreporting in sheriff-coroner counties necessitates further scrutiny. Disparities in officer-involved death reporting suggest political pressure may play a role in classifying deaths.

Keywords: Death investigation systems; Forensic pathology; Justifiable homicides; Legal intervention; Officer-involved homicides; Sheriff-coroner.

Figure 1:

Average number of officer-involved homicides by sheriff-coroner status. The figures indicate the average number of officer-involved homicides per county per year in each of the three data sets: FE, NVSS, and SHR, for California’s 58 counties. The left panel corresponds to the counties without sheriff-coroner and the right panel to the counties with sheriff-coroner in each year. FE indicates Fatal Encounters; NVSS, National Vital Statistics System; SHR, Supplementary Homicides Report.