Police Involved Homicides in Ohio, 1959-1988

Randolph Roth, The Ohio State University

The study of homicides of and by law enforcement officers and security guards has been hampered by significant problems with respect to the collection of data on this population of events. Prior studies have found that the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Death in Custody Reporting Program suffer from substantial underreporting and lack sufficient detail of homicides committed by and against law enforcement. Using data from 1959 to 1988 from our pilot project on Ohio, which seeks to improve the quality of homicide data in the nation from 1959 to the present, the essay will compare the coding of police homicides across multiple data sources, including department-level police records, Ohio Department of Health mortality records, death certificates, the F.B.I.’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, the National Center for Health Statistics mortality statistics, coroner’s reports, and newspaper articles. My colleagues and I are creating a clustered random sample of all known homicides in 36 counties in Ohio, 1959-present, including police involved homicides and homicides of law enforcement officers. The paper will then discuss the rates, circumstances, and changing character of homicides involving police officers in Ohio from 1959 through 1988, through analysis of the more than 400 such homicides from the first three decades of our study.

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 Presented in Session 170. Police and investigative techniques