Research Symposium

BIO

Leila Stemler is a first-year student at FSU with a psychology major and a criminology minor. She is involved in the Exploration + Discovery Living Learning Community as well as UROP. She is currently working on a criminology research project with Dr. Keller Sheppard regarding the data organization of fatal police force.

Comprehensive Overview on the Data Collections for Police Use of Fatal Force: Implications for Future Research

Abstract

Over the past several decades, police use of fatal force has driven public policy reform and subsequently amplified the racial disparities prevalent within police violence. Public outcry in the high-profile deaths of minority individuals, such as George Floyd, continues to drive police reform and the demand for transparency, accountability, and evidence-based policies within police work.

Crowd-sourced media such as Fatal Encounters, the Washington Post, and Mapping Police Violence lack the ability to collect a comprehensive report on the rate of force, temporal trends, characteristics of officers and citizens, and the inclusion of incidents for comparative purposes. A collective data pull from numerous public data sources was gathered and dispersed into datasets, followed by additional coding through Qualtrics. The focus is to refine the categorized incident reports that public datasets lack in order to display a comprehensive report of police use of fatal force.

The standard list of criteria includes ensuring compatibility with public law enforcement agencies and accurate definitions of police use of fatal force. This accurate definition excludes accidental deaths and differentiation if an officer is working in an official capacity, whether that is on duty or off duty at the time of the incident.

The result of data collection is inconclusive thus far; implications for future research will be valuable for long-term use. Opportunities to analyze police use of fatal force continue to drive police reform, and comprehensive datasets produced in this study are intended to substantially support future research and reform.

Keywords: Criminology, Fatal Police Force