Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Researchers have yet to explore the validity of ‘unofficial’ media-driven and crowdsourced police-involved killings data. This omission is important because unofficial data are touted as providing accurate counts and narratives pertaining to officer-involved shootings – at least relative to official data. To address this shortcoming, we compared the incidence of and details surrounding officer-involved killings in three unofficial data-sets (FatalEncounters.org, Deadspin, and the Washington Post) to officially collected data on officer-involved shootings from the city of Dallas. Reporting on the incidence of officer-involved killings was mostly consistent across data sources. Incident details varied across data sources, however, especially with respect to investigation outcomes.
Ozkan et al. (Fri,) studied this question.