NPR finds that US government wildly overcounted school shootings
August 31, 2018 8:44 AM   Subscribe

The US Education Department reported that nearly 240 schools had at least one school shooting in 2015-16. NPR found that only 11 incidents could be verified. This seems to be a matter of incompetence-- designing a good questionnaire and checking on the results is harder than it sounds.

Part of the problem was a very wide and unintuitive definition of school shooting: "In the 2015-2016 school year, "Has there been at least one incident at your school that involved a shooting (regardless of whether anyone was hurt)?""

In addition, there were errors in filling out the questionnaire. "For example, the CRDC reports 26 shootings within the Ventura Unified School District in Southern California.

"I think someone pushed the wrong button," said Jeff Davis, an assistant superintendent there. The outgoing superintendent, Joe Richards, "has been here for almost 30 years and he doesn't remember any shooting," Davis added. "We are in this weird vortex of what's on this screen and what reality is.""

"The biggest discrepancy in sheer numbers was the 37 incidents listed in the CRDC for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Roseann Canfora, the district's chief communications officer, told us that, in fact, 37 schools reported "possession of a knife or a firearm," which is the previous question on the form.

The number 37, then, was apparently entered on the wrong line."
posted by Nancy Lebovitz (27 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
Boy I sure am glad NPR blew this scandal wide open, rather than focusing on anodyne things like "why is there no central authority for recording school shootings or police officers murdering black people?" Now we get to listen to the NRA gleefully cite NPR in their ongoing war against any and all gun regulations.
posted by Mayor West at 8:55 AM on August 31, 2018 [43 favorites]


I know we should never assume malice when incompetence would explain it. However, when Betsy DeVos, sister of Erik Prince, appointee of Donald Trump is head of the department, well, it seems suspicious.

There's a lot of money to be made in supplying schools with firearms and security apparatus.
posted by explosion at 8:56 AM on August 31, 2018 [9 favorites]


Yikes. Why would you try to get facts like this from a survey? I guess no one is really keeping track is the issue?

Liz Hill, an Education Department spokeswoman, told NPR that "at least five districts have submitted requests to OCR to amend the school-related shootings data that they submitted for the 2015-16 CRDC." The plan is to issue what is called "errata" to update the data, but the original document will not be republished, Hill said.

Hill made the point that any "misreporting" is the schools' responsibility, not the department's: "As always, data reported by recipients is self-reported and self-certified."


Why would this all be self-reported!?
posted by ODiV at 9:03 AM on August 31, 2018 [14 favorites]


However, when Betsy DeVos, sister of Erik Prince, appointee of Donald Trump is head of the department, well, it seems suspicious.

I'm not sure that's relevant to data that was collected for 2015-2016.

Agreed with ODiV, the real scandal is that there isn't a better way to track this data than simply passing around a survey.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:05 AM on August 31, 2018 [12 favorites]


Why isn't the data pulled from police reports? Every time a gun goes off in a school, doesn't it necessitate at least a call to the local authorities and an official incident report?
posted by Iris Gambol at 9:11 AM on August 31, 2018 [9 favorites]


Boy I sure am glad NPR blew this scandal wide open, rather than focusing on anodyne things like "why is there no central authority for recording school shootings or police officers murdering black people?" Now we get to listen to the NRA gleefully cite NPR in their ongoing war against any and all gun regulations.

It looks to me like NPR pretty much covered this. By my reading, the NRA isn't really well served by the report.


I'm not sure that's relevant to data that was collected for 2015-2016.


From what I can tell the survey was done In 2018. Though I'm not sure it makes a difference. The data collection procedure used is flawed.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:21 AM on August 31, 2018 [7 favorites]


Why would this all be self-reported!?

Honestly, I'm wondering how many other studies are self reported, and why. Has it always been this way, or have cost-cutting measures meant the DoE doesn't possess its own researchers?
posted by corb at 9:27 AM on August 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Why isn't the data pulled from police reports?

Is there a national database of police reports? It's self-reported because there isn't money to do anything else.
posted by dilaudid at 9:32 AM on August 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


There's the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program.
posted by BWA at 9:54 AM on August 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


The headline on this is rather unfortunate, and there are a ton of people are going to see the message here as "there aren't many school shootings after all, no one should worry about this!" But the story itself seems to mostly put the focus on the lack of systematic data collection, and the badness of the survey itself. "Government data collection on the rate of school shootings" is a less-exciting headline, but it's an important thing to know about.
posted by fencerjimmy at 9:55 AM on August 31, 2018 [9 favorites]


I don't know if it's bad-faith reporting or just shoddy research, but I lost any fucks I had to give about NPR a long time ago. In any event, the focus on how many shootings there were rather than any of a number of far more important factors like availability of guns to minors, the financial and psychological costs in addition to the physical injuries and deaths, the mapping of (lack of) gun control laws and rates of gun violence in schools, and the normalization of gun culture and associated gun violence all beg for in-depth reporting. It's tailor-made to encourage attacks on concerned parents for being coddled little snowflakes, rather than grapple with the fact the uniquely high level of gun ownership in the US, combined with a gun culture that clearly positions guns as cool toys, has very real and very powerful effects on our feelings of safety. I mean, heavens forfend that they actually listen to every concerned parents' 1000% valid fears without letting some gun-humper moan about taking away MUH FREEDOMS. Hell, in the interest of being "balanced," they could have at very least have spent the same amount of time going over how quickly current 2A advocacy has come to depend both on the threat of gun violence to suppress other Constitutional rights, and the silence and complicity of many gun owners.

In the meantime, there's been a number of interesting if not blockbuster studies around gun violence that, in a ideal world, would each be worthy of the kind of in-depth reporting of the sort NPR would probably have done several years ago. For instance, gun injuries drop nationwide by an average of 20% during the NRA's annual convention, and over 60% in the state where the convention is held. There could be any of a number of great NPR pieces about how this suggests that--contrary to 2A advocates--neither experience with guns nor training is a good predictor of gun safety.

And then there's a report that the rise of murders and other gun violence in the 90s wasn't driven by crack, as many (especially conservatives) would have us believe, but instead by a surge in the manufacture and illegal running of guns across state lines. Not coincidentally, this was a period where the ATF was pushed to loosen oversight and regulation of the gun industry. Seems like NPR could have done a whole bunch of pieces on that.

Or maybe they could have talked about how Adam Putnam, who just lost to Ron DeSantis, apparently let his office just grant CCLs willy-nilly without conducting background checks for a year? In the unlikely event they brought it up, it was essentially just a throwaway line.

And let's not forget that there's plenty of dirt to dig up on the Dept of Ed themselves. Maybe NPR could have found the time to do some actual reporting on, say, the fact that, under DeVos, they have consistently been under-reporting racial discrimination while launching a full-frontal attack on affirmative action policies and the resources available to sexual harassment and assault victims. I guess they just couldn't find the time?
posted by zombieflanders at 10:08 AM on August 31, 2018 [13 favorites]


LexisNexis has a "police reports" database which tracks car accidents nationwide (and maybe the data's pulled from their eCrash product, which serves police departments by streamlining reporting procedure?), where consumers ("eliminate the need to drive to the police department, find parking and stand in line to request a copy of your accident report") or commercial interests can order accident reports online.

The company's Risk Solutions arm has a Law Enforcement and Public Safety section, including an "information data-sharing in a cross-jurisdictional data exchange" product.

Is this just yet another thing we're not doing properly, at the governmental level, because some company's making a buck? WE ARE SO BAD AT EVERYTHING.

Off to read the terms and conditions, so the hair on the back of my neck stays up.
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:34 AM on August 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Sorry for the incoherency. By 'this' I did mean tracking the school shooting data, too, and crime stats in general; we privatize far too much, and suffer when nothing's done correctly and/or the information is not made freely available.
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:47 AM on August 31, 2018


There's a lot of money to be made in supplying schools with firearms and security apparatus.

And imagine how much money the medical industry makes off shootings.
posted by pracowity at 10:59 AM on August 31, 2018


There are lots of reasons not to report school shootings to the police, so I honestly don't think self-reporting via survey vs the police explicitly investigating and cataloguing every event is that big a deal.

Just operationally, the interviews, the lost class time, the parent paranoia, the stigma of being a 'school shooting school', the tossing of more kids into the justice system, and different stigmas about shooting guns in rural schools would be decent reasons not to report non-injury firings of guns.

But then again, fixing all the following and then stringent police reporting would probably be the best.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:08 AM on August 31, 2018


Is it paranoia if a gun is discharged at your child's school, even if no one got shot?

And while I don't advocate more kids tossed in the justice system, however that gun a) wound up on school grounds (if it's not a security guard's) and b) wound up being fired (particularly if it's a security guard's doing) should always involve the police, even if the process is inconvenient. And, you know, gets the police involved.
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:39 AM on August 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


There's money (and power) in gun control, and there's money in hardening schools against gun violence, so I don't think there's much to be gained by looking at possible motivations.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:43 PM on August 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


There's money (and power) in gun control, and there's money in hardening schools against gun violence, so I don't think there's much to be gained by looking at possible motivations.

In a country with as much gun violence as the US I have to ask for a hard data on this. Everything I have seen says exactly the opposite.
posted by evilDoug at 12:50 PM on August 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


evilDoug: I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with, but it would have been more accurate if I'd said that there's *potential* money and power in gun control-- people are going to have to be paid to administrate and enforce it.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 1:13 PM on August 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Is it paranoia if a gun is discharged at your child's school, even if no one got shot?

Possibly? I mean 'discharged at a school' can mean across 100+ acres on a modern campus. Inside an occupied building, then 'no'.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:23 PM on August 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I must say, implying that advocating for gun control in a country with uniquely high levels of gun ownership and violence is driven by lust for gold and power is a new one to me. Still gross as fuck, though.
posted by zombieflanders at 2:03 PM on August 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


No reliable database of school shootings, you say? Heck, there isn't even a national database of police shootings.

Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch tried to institute a national reporting system for police shootings to the FBI but it was axed by Jeff Sessions. All of those statistics you see about police shootings? Those aren't FBI statistics. Those are tabulated by non-profit groups who painstakingly pore over hundreds of newspapers day after day looking for local stories about shootings. That's the only reliable source for data.

Republicans and the NRA want to treat gun issues just like they treat climate change issues -- ax all data collection and scientific analysis because nothing good can come of it for them.

In the case of school shootings, it allows Republicans to over claim in the absence of real data. In the case of police shootings, it allows Republicans to under claim in the absence of real data. And for gun self-defense claims, they can just make up numbers whole hog.
posted by JackFlash at 2:21 PM on August 31, 2018 [13 favorites]


What am I missing? Why is there a consensus that self-reporting is so horrible in this particular case? What is the best way to get reports of school shooting data if not from the school? Or is self-reporting a term of art in this context I don't get.

After reading TFA I certainly get Nancy Lebovitz's point about poor survey design, and any number of other points people might make about validation, follow up, centralization of data, etc, but I'm missing the initial collection issue.

Dee see the reports from local police departments comment but this is just another form of self-reporting and also seems worse (since they probably have way more shootings total and possibly jurisdictional issues that would lead to double counting or inadvertent exclusions.)
posted by mark k at 6:57 PM on August 31, 2018


Honestly, I'm wondering how many other studies are self reported, and why.

Oil spills are self reported.
posted by eustatic at 9:03 PM on August 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Regardless of the many questions raised by this story, I'm quite happy that these freak, horrible events occur less often than had been thought.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:39 PM on August 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Hey NPR, it turns out there are actually still too many school shootings, period.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:31 AM on September 20, 2018




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