{"id":43754,"date":"2018-06-01T08:00:29","date_gmt":"2018-06-01T12:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/?p=43754"},"modified":"2018-05-22T13:47:20","modified_gmt":"2018-05-22T17:47:20","slug":"rib-ois-context-means-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/rib-ois-context-means-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"Research in Brief: Officer-Involved Shootings: Context Means Everything"},"content":"protected_content","excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Police use of deadly force is undeniably one of the most serious of all governmental acts. That said, this action is legally permissible in the United States in order to save a life, including that of an officer or innocent bystander. Until recently, it was not possible to determine the number of officer-involved shootings (OIS) that occur each year in the United States. Thanks to the\u00a0<em>Washington Post<\/em>, three years of data now exist that show police fatally shoot approximately 1,000 people each year.\u00a0Other data sets have recently come into existence, including the OIS Data Collection Initiative by the Police Foundation and the Major Cities Chiefs Association (featured in the May 2018\u00a0<em>Police Chief<\/em>), as well as those by other media outlets and crowdsourced websites (e.g.,\u00a0<em>The Guardian<\/em>, killedbypolice.net, and fatalencounters.org).\u00a0These projects have generated data sets that suggest similar totals, with each data collection method having its particular strengths and limitations. While these data are critically important, they are limited to fatalities and provide no insight about \u201csuicide-by-cop\u201d; shootings that produce nonfatal injuries; misses; or situations in which officers could have fired a weapon but chose not to. Nevertheless, the data still provide a helpful numerator (total number of fatal police shootings) that was previously unknown. The challenge, then, is making sense of this numerator. In other words, what is the appropriate\u00a0<em>denominator<\/em>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[152,160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-research-in-brief"],"acf":{"post_author":"Justin Nix, Assistant Professor, University of Nebraska Omaha, and Geoffrey Alpert, Professor, University of South Carolina","main_category":"Research in Brief","legacy_article_id":"","legacy_issue_id":""},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.4 (Yoast SEO v24.6) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Research in Brief: Officer-Involved Shootings: Context Means Everything - Police Chief Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/rib-ois-context-means-everything\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Research in Brief: Officer-Involved Shootings: Context Means Everything\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Police use of deadly force is undeniably one of the most serious of all governmental acts. That said, this action is legally permissible in the United States in order to save a life, including that of an officer or innocent bystander. Until recently, it was not possible to determine the number of officer-involved shootings (OIS) that occur each year in the United States. Thanks to the\u00a0Washington Post, three years of data now exist that show police fatally shoot approximately 1,000 people each year.\u00a0Other data sets have recently come into existence, including the OIS Data Collection Initiative by the Police Foundation and the Major Cities Chiefs Association (featured in the May 2018\u00a0Police Chief), as well as those by other media outlets and crowdsourced websites (e.g.,\u00a0The Guardian, killedbypolice.net, and fatalencounters.org).\u00a0These projects have generated data sets that suggest similar totals, with each data collection method having its particular strengths and limitations. While these data are critically important, they are limited to fatalities and provide no insight about \u201csuicide-by-cop\u201d; shootings that produce nonfatal injuries; misses; or situations in which officers could have fired a weapon but chose not to. Nevertheless, the data still provide a helpful numerator (total number of fatal police shootings) that was previously unknown. The challenge, then, is making sense of this numerator. In other words, what is the appropriate\u00a0denominator?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/rib-ois-context-means-everything\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Police Chief Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/TheIACP\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-06-01T12:00:29+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/Figure-1-Age-Distribution-of-Fatal-Shootings.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Margaret White\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@TheIACP\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@TheIACP\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Margaret White\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/rib-ois-context-means-everything\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/rib-ois-context-means-everything\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Margaret White\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/#\/schema\/person\/51da39bf2b152cf9aff96cdeed62d5a4\"},\"headline\":\"Research in Brief: Officer-Involved Shootings: Context Means Everything\",\"datePublished\":\"2018-06-01T12:00:29+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/rib-ois-context-means-everything\/\"},\"wordCount\":1393,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/rib-ois-context-means-everything\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"http:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/Figure-1-Age-Distribution-of-Fatal-Shootings.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Columns\",\"Research in Brief\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/rib-ois-context-means-everything\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/rib-ois-context-means-everything\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.policechiefmagazine.org\/rib-ois-context-means-everything\/\",\"name\":\"Research in Brief: Officer-Involved Shootings: Context Means Everything - 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