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Mission/Vision
Our mission: To better understand the circumstances and the risk factors that lead
to violent deaths in California. Violent deaths, including homicide, suicide, and unintentional gun deaths,
take the lives of some 6,000 Californians each year. Most victims are under 40 years old. All these deaths
are preventable. Traditionally, public health tries to understand these deaths by analyzing death
certificates, which describe the victim but tell little about the circumstances. To get complete picture of
each death, we have to take advantage of all the data sources available. CalVDRS supports its vision with
innovative, efficient data collection from the richest data sources on violent deaths.
Program Description
California’s Violent Death Reporting System is run by the Epidemiology and Prevention for Injury Control
(EPIC) Branch of the Department of Public Health (CDPH) and is funded by the Centers of Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) as part of its National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). California is one of
17 states participating in NVDRS, and, due to its size and decentralized government, the only state not
starting with a statewide program.
In 2005, the first year of the project, EPIC staff contracted three county health departments –
Alameda, San Francisco, and Santa Clara – to collect data on violent deaths from four of the NVDRS
required data sources – death certificates, coroner/medical examiner records, police reports, and crime
laboratory records. In 2006, we were funded to expand to Los Angeles, Riverside, and Shasta Counties,
giving us valuable information on approximately half the state’s violent deaths.
Statewide expansion is one of the goals of CalVDRS. To do so using the current model would be prohibitively expensive and inefficient.
With California’s Electronic Death Registration System (EDRS), created in 2005 to allow counties to file
death certificates online instead of mailing paper forms, we saw the opportunity to create an efficient
statewide system. Using funds from The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, we created a violent death
supplement to death certificates in EDRS which capture information from coroners on violent death.
The California Wellness Foundation (TCWF) funded us to continue developing this system by allowing us to pay coroners
to complete this supplement. Beginning in 2007, five counties are participating in this – Sacramento, Kern,
San Mateo, Santa Clara*, and Monterey. We are also using these funds to improve EDRS so that counties can
transfer data electronically from any software to EDRS, instead of entering data directly into EDRS,
possibly duplicating their own efforts.
The third and fourth data sources, police records and crime laboratory reports, will need to be collected
manually at the local level since there is no statewide electronic data system. Supplementary Homicide
Reports (SHR) are reported to California’s Department of Justice (DOJ) according to state law and DOJ creates
an electronic file. Unfortunately, this file contains only information on preliminary investigation of
homicides and does not report suicides.
Target Population
Violent deaths kill Californians of every age, race, and circumstance. Homicide victims are more often
young nonwhite males, whereas suicide victims are more often older white males, although female and teen
suicides are of particular interest.
Key Partners
Our key partners are local health departments, county coroners, and law enforcement agencies, who all
provide data and will benefit from learning more about violent deaths in their communities. Other partners
are the CDC, who funds our project and combines the data we collect for use nationally. The California
Wellness Foundation has a stake in our project and its future. EDRS is a key partner as we utilize this
system to collect our data and fund improvements to the system. Advocacy groups will be key partners as
data are analyzed and used to make policy recommendations to prevent these deaths.
Recent Successes/Milestones
In the three years of funding, CalVDRS has expanded data collection from 3 cities to 10 counties,
obtained additional funding to pursue its electronic data collection efforts, and used its progress to
legitimize this system among data providers and other agencies throughout the state.
Contact
For more information, contact Jason Van Court at (916)552-9849 or
Jason.VanCourt@cdph.ca.gov.
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