National Institute of Justice Funds First Open-Source Catalogue of U.S. School Shootings

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NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF JUSTICE FUNDS FIRST OPEN-SOURCE CATALOGUE OF U.S. SCHOOL SHOOTINGS

         WASHINGTON – The Office of Justice Programs’ National Institute of Justice today published an article highlighting the creation of an NIJ-funded open-source database of school shootings that will help researchers and policymakers study the root causes of school shootings and identify possible intervention points. The American School Shooting Study is the first national open-source database of all known shootings that resulted in at least one injury on K-12 school grounds between 1990 and 2016. It provides researchers with a dataset of these incidents that allows for analysis of factors such as the characteristics of school shooters, key causes of school shootings and where and when incidents occurred. The profiles highlight important distinctions between shootings rooted in the individual circumstances of the shooters and those that reflect extensions of larger issues like drugs and gang involvement.

           “School shootings are a source of serious community trauma, yet we are often slow to perceive them as symptoms of larger community problems,” said OJP Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Amy L. Solomon. “By capturing and presenting profiles from more than a quarter-century of these incidents, the American School Shooting Study will give us a better understanding of the complexity of school shooting cases and help us develop more sophisticated strategies for preventing future tragedies.”

           The work described in this article was supported by NIJ funding awarded to the Research Foundation of CUNY on behalf of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. This article is based on the grantee report, “Understanding the Causes of School Violence Using Open Source Data,” by J.D. Freilich, S.M. Chermak, N.M. Connell, B. Klein and E. Greene-Colozzi