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National Violent Death Reporting System, 2004

Metadata Updated: March 12, 2025

The National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) collects data on violent deaths, i.e., suicides, homicides, and legal intervention, including terrorism-related incidents. The system also includes some other types of deaths, namely deaths due to undetermined intent and unintentional deaths due to firearms. One of the main reasons for including these types of deaths is that there is overlap in how these deaths are coded. For example, a particular poisoning case may be classified as an undetermined death in one state, but in a neighboring state, the same case may be coded as a suicide or an unintentional poisoning. NVDRS is an incident-based system that collects data from different data sources, including death certificates, coroner and medical examiner records, police reports, crime lab data, and child fatality review records. The system collects data on a violent incident, the deaths belonging to that incident, the injury mechanisms leading to death, and the alleged perpetrators (suspects) involved in the violent incident. The relationship of the victim to the suspect is also recorded, as are the relationships of each person to the injury mechanisms included. State health departments participating in NVDRS typically identify relevant violent deaths as their death certificates are filed and then establish the details of the cases from medical examiner, coroner, and law enforcement records. Data collection is ongoing as the source documents from the different data providers become available at different times and intervals. The data represent the violent incidents that occurred between January and December of that data year as submitted by the participating states.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: us-pd

Collection

This dataset is part of the following collection:

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
Metadata Updated Date March 12, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOJ JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
Metadata Updated Date March 12, 2025
Publisher Bureau of Justice Statistics
Maintainer
Identifier 2147
Data First Published 2006-12-15T00:00:00
Language eng
Data Last Modified 2006-12-15T00:00:00
Public Access Level public
Aicategory Not AI-ready
Bureau Code 011:21
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://www.justice.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Collection Package Id dc8a1ae9-6c72-4947-ae9f-00fe07bd0416
Harvest Object Id c77ab645-cbdc-4f5a-828f-857237778114
Harvest Source Id 3290e90a-116f-42fc-86ac-e65521ef3b68
Harvest Source Title DOJ JSON
Internalcontactpoint {"@type": "vcard:Contact", "fn": "Ask BJS Bureau of Justice Statistics (USDOJ)", "hasEmail": "mailto:askbjs@usdoj.gov"}
Jcamsystem {"acronym": "OJP_EXT", "id": 8, "name": "External system not available in CSAM"}
License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Metadatamodified 9/2/2022 6:21:00 PM
Program Code 011:061
Publisher Hierarchy Office of Justice Programs > Bureau of Justice Statistics
Sourceidentifier https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR04574
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 9ab83c3aad9e689141f2b10037683f0a96b397ba700a2b91668fb83d14d82035
Source Schema Version 1.1

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