Who's Right: Different Outcomes When Police and Scientists View the Same Set of Homicide Events, New York City, 1988

• NCJ Number: 128793
• Date Published: 1990
• Author(s): P J Ryan; P J Goldstein; H H Brownstein; P A Bellucci
• Length: 26 pages
• Grant Number(s): 87-IJ-CX-0046
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Research (Applied/Empirical)

Annotation

This analysis of the accuracy of information collected by police on drug-related violent crime emphasizes findings from a project that sought to develop procedures for gathering valid and reliable data about drug-related homicides in New York City and to integrate these reporting and analytic procedures into protocols for homicide investigations by the New York City police.

Abstract

Information gathered by police regarding homicide events were compared with information on the same events gathered by onsite interviews by a researcher. Data were gathered on 414 homicide events which involved 491 perpetrators and 436 victims. The police were asked to indicate which category of a tripartite model best described the event. This model asserts that drugs and violence are related in three different ways: psychopharmacologically, economic compulsive, or systemic. The analysis indicated that the perception of reality inferred from crime data reported by the police differs from the perception of the same set of events by social scientists. In addition, a joint police-researcher effort improved the quality of data collected and permitted analyses that would otherwise not have been feasible. Tables and 56 references