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Approximately 1000 people are killed by police acting in the line of duty each year. Historically, research on these deaths, known as legal intervention homicides (LIH), has been limited by data that is either contextually rich but narrow in scope and not readily available to the public (e.g., police department reports from a single city), or detail-poor but geographically broad, large, and readily available (and maintained by federal agencies) (e.g., vital statistics and supplemental homicide reports). Over the past 5 years, however, researchers have turned to the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), which captures nearly all lethal police shootings in participating states while providing detailed incident and victim information. The current study extends prior work on police-involved lethal shootings in three important ways. First, we use latent class analysis to construct a data-driven, exhaustive, mutually exclusive typology of these events, using NVDRS data 2014-2015. Second, rather than fitting some, but not all cases into predefined sub-types, every case is assigned membership to a particular emergent class. Third, we use a validated case identification process in NVDRS to identify incidents of lethal police-involved shootings. Seven classes emerge. Classes differ across important incident and victim characteristics such as the event that brought the victim and law enforcement together, the highest level of force used by the victim against law enforcement, and the kind of weapon, if any, used by the victim during the incident. Demographic variables do not distribute uniformly across classes (e.g., the latent class in which the victim appeared to pose minimal threat to law enforcement was the only class in which the plurality of victims was a non-white race). Our approach to generating these typologies illustrates how data-driven techniques can complement subjective classification schemes and lay the groundwork for analogous analyses using police encounter data that include fatal and non-fatal outcomes.

In the United States, firearm homicides disproportionately occur in urban areas. We examine whether the same is true for fatal police shootings. We use data on fatal police shootings from Washington Post's "Fatal Force Database" (2015-2017). Using Census population estimates, we examine rates of fatal police shootings, stratified by race/ethnicity (White, Black, Hispanic), across urban and rural areas using five different classification schemes. Two classification schemes-from the National Center for Health Statistics and the US Department of Agriculture-use counties as the basic unit. Three classification schemes-from the National Center for Education Statistics, the US Census Bureau, and the website "FiveThirtyEight" use zip codes. There were just under 1000 fatal police shootings per year from 2015 to 2017, a rate of 0.31 per 100,000 population. Black victimization rates were more than twice those for Whites, with Hispanic victimization rates in between. Across all classification schemes there was little difference in rates of fatal police shootings between urban and rural areas, with suburbs having somewhat lower rates. Among Whites, rates of fatal police shooting victimization were higher in rural areas compared to urban areas, while among Blacks the rates were higher in more urban areas. Our results suggest that efforts to reduce police shootings of civilians should include rural and suburban as well as urban areas., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Objectives: To provide a nationally representative estimate of the proportion of gun owners who report a child has independent access to one of their guns and to describe characteristics of these gun owners relative to other gun owning parents.Study Design: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of online survey data collected in 2019 from a nationally representative sample of US adults in households with firearms (n=4030, response 65%). The sample comprised gun owning respondents living in homes with children (n=689) who were asked questions about their firearms, including how they were stored, and about whom other than themselves had access to their guns: "If you were not there, who in your household could get one of your guns (and load it if it is not loaded already) if they needed to?"Results: Twelve percent of US gun owners in homes with children report that a child has independent access to one of their guns (about one-fifth of those having children under age 12 only). Gun owners who reported child access were more likely than those who reported no child access to store guns unlocked and loaded, but still one fifth of those reporting access stored all guns locked and unloaded.Conclusions: We find that more than 10% of gun owners with children report that a child can independently access one of their guns, including parents who store all guns locked and unloaded, suggesting that guidance to parents should focus on access in addition to firearm storage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]