A Typology of Suicide by Police Incidents (In: Suicide and Law Enforcement, edited by D C Sheehan & J I Warren)

The authors created a typology of suicide by police by separating 143 such incidents from a database of 174 police shooting incidents. The 143 incidents consisted of 3 categories: direct confrontations; disturbed interventions; & criminal interventions. Direct confrontations presented a lower level of danger to police, but there was a high variability within this category. Suicide intervention, a subtype of disturbed interventions, was most likely to involve a successful use of less-than-lethal force. JA