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Fatal and non-fatal civilian injuries sustained during law enforcement-reported encounters in California, 2016-2021

Background

In 2015, California passed AB 71 to create a state-wide Use of Force Incident Reporting Database (URSUS) to tabulate law enforcement-reported encounters that resulted in serious bodily injury, death or discharge of a firearm. We use these data to analyse encounters that resulted in fatal and non-fatal civilian injuries in California between 2016 and 2021.

Methods

We performed a retrospective review of URSUS from January 2016 to December 2021. The main outcomes were the number of law enforcement encounters that involved civilian serious bodily injury or death and encounter-level characteristics.

Results

URSUS recorded 3677 incidents between 2016 and 2021 resulting in 942 civilian fatalities and 2735 instances of serious civilian injuries. Injury rates were highest for civilians who identified as Hispanic (1.80 injuries per 100 000 population) or black (5.17 injuries per 100 000 population). Injuries involving a firearm were usually fatal (58.9% fatality rate; 1471 injuries), while non-firearm incidents were more likely to result in serious injuries (4.2% fatality rate; 2929 injuries). We did not find statistically significant trends in rates of civilian injuries per 100 000 population.

Conclusion

Rates of law enforcement-related injuries were highest for Hispanic and black civilians in California between 2016 and 2021 and firearm-related injuries were overwhelmingly fatal. The URSUS database represents an important effort by law enforcement agencies to collect information on injuries and fatalities resulting from law enforcement encounters. Given similar databases exist in fewer than half of states, additional legislative efforts are needed to improve systematic national data collection on these encounters.

Prediction of the mechanism of suicide among Minnesota residents using data from the Minnesota violent death reporting system (MNVDRS)

Background

Suicide remains a major public health problem, and firearms are used in approximately half of all such incidents. This study sought to predict the occurrence of suicide specifically by firearm, as opposed to any other means of suicide, in order to help inform possible life-saving interventions.

Methods

This study involved data from the Minnesota Violent Death Reporting System. Models evaluated whether data beyond basic demographics generated increased prediction accuracy. Models were built using random forests, logistic regression and data imputation. Models were evaluated for prediction accuracy using the area under the curve analysis and for proper calibration.

Results

Results showed that models constructed with social determinants and personal history data led to increased prediction accuracy in comparison to models constructed with basic demographic information only. The study identified an optimised ‘top 20’ variables model with a 73% chance of correctly discerning relative incident risk for a pair of individuals. Age, height/weight, employment industry/occupation, sex and education level were found to be most highly predictive of firearm suicide in the study’s ‘top 20’ model.

Conclusions

The study demonstrated that the use of a firearm in a death by suicide, as opposed to any other means of suicide, can be reasonably well predicted when an individual’s social determinants and personal history are considered. These predictive models could help inform many prevention strategies, such as safe storage practices, background checks for firearm purchases or red flag laws.

Spatial de-concentration of firearm violence in Boston

It is a “law” of criminology that urban crime chronically recurs at the same microplaces (i.e., street segments and intersections). An influential study found high concentrations of firearm violence at micropl…

Sources of guns to dangerous people: What we learn by asking them

Gun violence exacts a lethal toll on public health. This paper focuses on reducing access to firearms by dangerous offenders, contributing original empirical data on the gun transactions that arm offenders in Chicago. Conducted in the fall of 2013, analysis of an open-ended survey of 99 inmates of Cook County Jail focuses on a subset of violence-prone individuals with the goal of improving law enforcement actions.

Among our principal findings:

*Our respondents (adult offenders living in Chicago or nearby) obtain most of their guns from their social network of personal connections. Rarely is the proximate source either direct purchase from a gun store, or theft.

*Only about 60% of guns in the possession of respondents were obtained by purchase or trade. Other common arrangements include sharing guns and holding guns for others.

*About one in seven respondents report selling guns, but in only a few cases as a regular source of income.

*Gangs continue to play some role in Chicago in organizing gun buys and in distributing guns to members as needed.

*The Chicago Police Department has a considerable effect on the workings of the underground gun market through deterrence. Transactions with strangers and less-trusted associates are limited by concerns over arrest risk (if the buyer should happen to be an undercover officer or a snitch), and about being caught with a “dirty” gun (one that has been fired in a crime).

The Association of Firearm Caliber With Likelihood of Death From Gunshot Injury in Criminal Assaults

Importance  A foundational issue in firearms policy has been whether the type of weapon used in an assault affects the likelihood of death.

Objective  To determine whether the likelihood of death from gunshot wounds inflicted in criminal assaults is associated with the power of the assailant’s firearm as indicated by its caliber.

Design, Setting, and Participants  Cross-sectional study with multivariate analysis of data on shooting cases extracted by the authors from police investigation files for assaults that took place in Boston, Massachusetts, between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2014. These data were analyzed between October 1, 2017, and February 18, 2018. In all cases the victim sustained 1 or more gunshot wounds in circumstances that the Boston Police Department deemed criminal. The working sample included all 221 gun homicides and a stratified random sample of 300 nonfatal cases drawn from the 1012 that occurred during the 5-year period. Seven nonfatal cases were omitted because they had been misclassified.

Exposures  The primary source of variation was the caliber of the firearm used to shoot the victim.

Main Outcomes and Measures  Whether the victim died from the gunshot wound(s).

Results  The final sample of 511 gunshot victims and survivors (n = 220 fatal; n = 291 nonfatal) was predominantly male (n = 470 [92.2%]), black (n = 413 [80.8%]) or Hispanic (n = 69 [13.5%]), and young (mean [SD] age, 26.8 [9.4] years). Police investigations determined firearm caliber in 184 nonfatal cases (63.2%) and 183 fatal cases (83.2%). These 367 cases were divided into 3 groups by caliber: small (.22, .25, and .32), medium (.38, .380, and 9 mm), or large (.357 magnum, .40, .44 magnum, .45, 10 mm, and 7.62 × 39 mm). Firearm caliber had no systematic association with the number of wounds, the location of wounds, circumstances of the assault, or victim characteristics, as demonstrated by χ2 tests of each cluster of variables and by a comprehensive multinomial logit analysis. A logit analysis of the likelihood of death found that compared with small-caliber cases, medium caliber had an odds ratio of 2.25 (95% CI, 1.37-3.70; P = .001) and large caliber had an odds ratio of 4.54 (95% CI, 2.37-8.70; P < .001). Based on a simulation using the logit equation, replacing the medium- and large-caliber guns with small-caliber guns would have reduced gun homicides by 39.5%.

Conclusions and Relevance  Firearms caliber was associated with the likelihood of death from gunshot wounds in criminal assault. Shootings with larger-caliber handguns were more deadly but no more sustained or accurate than shootings with smaller-caliber handguns. This conclusion is of direct relevance to the design of gun policy.

The Effect of Gun Availability on Violent Crime Patterns

Social scientists have started to find answers to some of the questions raised in the ongoing debate over gun control. The basic factual issue in this debate concerns the effect of gun availability on the distribution, seriousness, and number of violent crimes. Some evidence is available on each of these dimensions of the violent crime problem. The distribution of violent crimes among different types of victims is governed in part by the “vulnerability pattern” in weapon choice. The seriousness of robbery and assault incidents is influenced by weapon type, as indicated by the objective dangerousness and instrumental violence pattern. A reduc tion in gun availability would cause some weapon substitution and probably little change in overall robbery and assault rates—but the homicide rate would be reduced.

The Effect of Gun Availability on Robbery and Robbery Murder: A Cross-Section Study of Fifty Citie

Firearms are used in a large proportion of the violent crimes of robbery, assault, and murder. The widespread availability of firearms, particularly handguns, has frequently received part of the blame for the extraordinarily high rates of violent crimes in the United States, and the violent crime wave of the 1965-1975 decade may have been fueled in part by the growth in the availa­ bility of handguns in urban areas. Advocates of stringent gun control have long argued that the adoption of a program which made it more costly or timeconsuming or legally risky for criminals to obtain guns would have the effect of reducing the amount and seriousness of violent crimes (see Newton and Zimring, 1969).

The Influence of Gun Availability on Violent Crime Patterns

The spectacular increases in violent crime that began in the mid-1960s continue, and Americans are currently being murdered, robbed, and raped at historically unprecedented rates. Firearms are used in a minority of violent crimes but are of special concern because more than 60 percent of the most serious crimes-criminal homicides-are committed with firearms. This essay presents a variety of evidence to the effect that the widespread availability of firearms contributes to the criminal homicide rate and influences violent crime patterns in several other respects as well. A gun is usually superior to other weapons readily available for use in violent crime; even in the hands of a weak and unskilled assailant, a gun poses a credible threat and can be used to kill quickly, from a distance, and in a relatively “impersonal” fashion. Guns are particularly valuable against relatively invulnerable targets. Hence, gun availability facilitates robbery of commercial places and lethal assaults on people who would ordinarily be able to defend themselves against other weapons. Some of the patterns of gun use in violent crime can be readily interpreted in terms of relative vulnerability of different types of victims. Guns are also more dangerous than other weapons, in the sense that victims of robbery and assault are more likely to be killed if the assailant uses a gun. On the other hand, the victim is less likely to be injured in a gun robbery than in other robberies, since the gun robber usually does not feel the need to employ physical force. This analysis suggests a number of predictions concerning the effects of gun availability on the number, distribution, and seriousness of violent crimes. In principle, these predictions could be tested directly by observing the effects of changes in gun availability on statistical characterizations of violent crime patterns. Not much research of this sort has been done, in part because it is difficult to find a suitable measure for gun availability. Future research should be directed toward remedying this problem. In the meantime, it seems fair to conclude from the available evidence that the type of weapon is not an incidental aspect of violent crime, but rather has a substantial influence on the nature of the encounter and its likely consequences.