Leveraging the National Incident-based Reporting System to compare fatal and nonfatal shooting incidents

Abstract

A small body of research has shown that little differentiates fatal from nonfatal shootings in terms of incident, offender, and victim characteristics. If this is the case, it suggests that crime prevention and response efforts targeting one shooting type are likely to affect the other. It also suggests that the heavy emphasis that police departments place on investigating fatal shootings compared to nonfatal shootings explains the higher clearance rates for the former offense type, and that homicides could be prevented by dedicating greater resources to nonfatal shooting investigations. There is little research on this topic because of a lack of data on nonfatal shootings; few police departments track nonfatal shootings and even fewer make these data publicly available. To advance this literature, the current study replicates prior work using data on fatal and nonfatal shootings obtained from 3 police departments and a first of its kind fuzzy matching procedure to link these data to these agencies’ National Incident-based Reporting System data to explore how fatal and nonfatal shootings differ. We replicate past research by finding many similarities between the two offense types, but also some differences. These results should inform gun violence prevention and response strategies.