A new multi-level data resource on fatal and non-fatal injurious shootings by police and their implications for population health

Shootings by police are an urgent public health crisis in the US, having reverberating impacts not only for direct victims but for loved ones and community members. Even so, our understanding of these impacts has been hampered by numerous data limitations, including a focus on fatal shootings, limited granularity of data pertaining to shooting features (e.g., distance from and time since shootings; victim characteristics) and a reliance on purely ecological and/or cross-sectional data. We outline a new data resource established by our team to address critical gaps in understanding the health impacts of shootings of non-officers by police in the United States (US) by linking geocoded fatal and nonfatal shooting incidents (from the Augmented Gun Violence Archive, or a-GVA) with individual-level longitudinal health data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). Add Health data collection began in 1994–1995 with a nationally representative sample of 20,745 adolescents (ages 12–19) and follows participants into adulthood; while Add Health includes five waves of longitudinal follow-up, the present linkage focuses on Wave V (2016–2018), when participants were aged 33–44. This resource links Wave V respondents ( n = 11,369) to temporally coded and geocoded shootings by police incidents, which captures variation in geographic and temporal proximity of shooting events (within 20 miles of respondents’ homes and 12 months of their Wave V interview). The dataset includes rich individual-level data on mental health, physical health, and biomarkers, as well as contextual measures of fatal and nonfatal shootings by police (e.g., gun policy data) and incident characteristics (e.g., victim demographics, mental health symptoms involvement). Ultimately, this data resource is the first-of-its-kind resource and may enable research on how fatal and nonfatal shootings by police and their features (i.e., distance from residence, time since shooting, victim characteristics) relate to health in a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults.