UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #803

Overall Research Project Description Police violence represents a pressing public policy issue, yet national data on this topic has been lacking. While recent advancements have been made in tracking police use of fatal force through media-driven and crowdsourced databases, comparable efforts to track assaults on police officers have been insufficient. The Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) program, a longstanding national dataset, has been the only significant source of such data. However, LEOKA has been plagued by issues of underreporting and reliability, raising concerns about its effectiveness in accurately capturing the scope of the problem. Fortunately, two new reporting systems have emerged to potentially address the shortcomings of LEOKA and shed light on national trends in assaults on the police.

The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is a detailed crime data collection system managed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States. Unlike the traditional Summary Reporting System (SRS), which provides aggregate crime data, NIBRS offers a more granular and comprehensive dataset by collecting detailed information on individual crime incidents and arrests. This includes the circumstances and context of each crime, the characteristics of the victims and offenders, and specific information about the location, time, and nature of the offense. Most importantly for police violence research, victim information now enables research to identify offenses in which a law enforcement officer was reported as a victim.

The National Gun Violence Archive (GVA) is an independent research and data collection initiative that tracks gun-related violence across the United States. Founded in 2013, the project aims to provide accurate and comprehensive data on incidents of gun violence, including fatal and non-fatal shootings, mass shootings, accidents, and defensive use of firearms. The GVA's data is widely used by policymakers, researchers, media outlets, and advocacy groups to understand the scope and impact of gun violence in the U.S. Recent studies have utilized the GVA to identify violent incidents in which law enforcement officers are victims of gun violence.

The research project aims to conduct a comparative analysis of these NIBRS, GVAs, and LEOKA and their suitability for research on violence against the police. The study will focus on evaluating the accuracy, consistency, and comprehensiveness of each data source, providing a nuanced understanding of how violence against law enforcement is recorded and reported. To this end, we will better understand potential biases or gaps in the data, such as underreporting or overrepresentation of specific incidents. Through quantitative analysis and qualitative assessment, the research aims to offer recommendations for improving data collection practices and enhancing the reliability of information used in research and policymaking. Research assistants would assist in conducting literature reviews, cleaning data, and assisting with quantitative and qualitative comparisons.