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Assessment of Coverage in the Arrest-Related Deaths Program

NCJ Number
249099
Date Published
October 2015
Length
5 pages
Publication Series
Annotation
This is the executive summary of a report on an assessment conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in 2013 to determine whether the methodology and coverage of BJS's collection of data on arrest-related deaths (ARD) in the United States was accurate and complete.
Abstract

Provides an executive summary of the Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD) component of the Deaths in Custody Reporting Program (DCRP) technical assessment report. Data from the ARD represent a national accounting of persons who have died during the process of arrest, including homicides by law enforcement personnel and deaths attributed to suicide, intoxication, accidental injury, and natural causes. This executive summary includes a technical review of the ARD program's methodology and an assessment of the program's coverage of all arrest-related deaths in the United States. It also provides key findings from the comparison of the ARD program to Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) maintained by the FBI. The coverage assessment matched law enforcement homicides captured by the ARD program to those found in the SHR, followed by a capture-recapture analysis to provide information on the scope and characteristics of cases eligible for inclusion in the ARD program that are captured in one or both of these data systems. See also Arrest-Related Deaths Program Assessment: Technical Report and Arrest-Related Deaths Program: Data Quality Profile.

Date Published: October 1, 2015