Felonious Homicides of American Police Officers, 1977-1992
Description
The study was a comprehensive analysis of felonious
killings of officers. The purposes of the study were (1) to analyze
the nature and circumstances of incidents of felonious police killings
and (2) to analyze trends in the numbers and rates of killings across
different types of agencies and to explain these differences. For Part
1, Incident-Level Data, an incident-level database was created to
capture all incidents involving the death of a police officer from
1983 through 1992. Data on officers and incidents were collected from
the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) data
collection as coded by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. In
addition to the UCR data, the Police Foundation also coded information
from the LEOKA narratives that are not part of the computerized LEOKA
database from the FBI. For Part 2, Agency-Level Data, the researchers
created an agency-level database to research systematic differences
among rates at which law enforcement officers had been feloniously
killed from 1977 through 1992. The investigators focused on the 56
largest law enforcement agencies because of the availability of data
for explanatory variables. Variables in Part 1 include year of
killing, involvement of other officers, if the officer was killed with
his/her own weapon, circumstances of the killing, location of fatal
wounds, distance between officer and offender, if the victim was
wearing body armor, if different officers were killed in the same
incident, if the officer was in uniform, actions of the killer and of
the officer at entry and final stage, if the killer was visible at
first, if the officer thought the killer was a felon suspect, if the
officer was shot at entry, and circumstances at anticipation, entry,
and final stages. Demographic variables for Part 1 include victim's
sex, age, race, type of assignment, rank, years of experience, agency,
population group, and if the officer was working a security job. Part
2 contains variables describing the general municipal environment,
such as whether the agency is located in the South, level of poverty
according to a poverty index, population density, percent of
population that was Hispanic or Black, and population aged 15-34 years
old. Variables capturing the crime environment include the violent
crime rate, property crime rate, and a gun-related crime
index. Lastly, variables on the environment of the police agencies
include violent and property crime arrests per 1,000 sworn officers,
percentage of officers injured in assaults, and number of sworn
officers.
Resources
| Name |
Format |
Description |
Link |
|
0 |
ICPSR03187.v1 |
https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR03187.v1 |
Tags
- police-officers
- law-enforcement-agencies
- police-safety
- felony-offenses
- police-deaths
- homicide
- crime-rates