About the Michigan Statewide System for Firearm Injury Surveillance
The web-based Statewide System for Firearm Injury Surveillance was created to help guide public health response efforts in the state of Michigan by the University of Michigan Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention.
Near real-time data about firearm fatalities can help inform data-driven public health and public safety response efforts by identifying foci for place-based interventions based on current spatiotemporal trends, and providing a timely basis for evaluating ongoing activities. Future stages of this project will include acquiring and incorporating non-fatal injury data.
What Data is Available?
The public-facing surveillance system provides county- and state-level firearm fatality summaries. A restricted level of access is granted to authorized public health and public safety practitioners across Michigan. Registered users can utilize an interactive dashboard which maps firearm incidents in near real-time (i.e. daily) and provides demographic briefs. Users can select a timeframe to tailor visualizations and view spatial and temporal trends in firearm injuries or generate printable reports. Data summaries can be customized by decedent demographic (e.g. age range; gender), manner of death (e.g. homicide; suicide) with an option to overlay place-based census data.
The surveillance system provides the following information to authorized users:
- Death / incident date
- Decedent demographic information (age range, race/ethnicity, gender)
- Randomly displaced incident location on a map (city, county, zip code)
- Manner of death (homicide, suicide, accidental, undetermined)
Data
Sources
In the current pilot stage, suspected firearm fatality data is obtained through Medicolegal Death Investigation Log (MDILog) and individual county medical examiners in counties across the state. The project team receives daily incident data from 47+ counties through a variety of mechanisms including a combination of data abstraction performed by U-M staff and data sent by partners through a preexisting system.
Data Limitations
Due to the near-real time nature of this system, all data collected is provisional and subject to change. Data may not always be complete and data should not be considered a definitive firearm fatality. All points on the map are approximate. Gender and race/ethnicity data on the dashboard are as reported by medical examiners in the field at the time of incident and not reflective of the deceased’s self-identity.
Contact Us
Please contact firearminjuryprevention@umich.edu for further information or questions.