What public FBI or medical forensic reports have been released in other high‑profile police shootings, and how long did disclosure take?

1. Federal aggregate reporting: slow, periodic, not incident‑level

The FBI’s National Use‑of‑Force Data Collection is designed to publish aggregate statistics about incidents that cause death or serious injury, not to release case‑by‑case forensic reports, and its public output depends on voluntary submissions from local agencies so dissemination is periodic and contingent on participation rather than immediate after an incident ^{[1] [2]}.

2. Medical‑forensic reports: local coroners drive disclosure and timing varies

Medical examiner and coroner reports are a key source for understanding fatal encounters—CDC’s NVDRS explicitly triangulates death certificates and coroner/medical examiner reports to build case detail—but the system covers participating states and does not guarantee rapid national disclosure; the literature makes clear NVDRS provides richer detail where available but is not a universal nor fast pipeline for immediate public release after each shooting ^{[4] [5]}.

3. High‑profile catalyst cases changed practice but not speed

The killing of Michael Brown in 2014 catalyzed scrutiny of reporting gaps and spurred new federal efforts to collect use‑of‑force data, but that reform (the FBI’s expanded collection) emerged over years—policy motions in late 2015 and public promotion thereafter—illustrating that institutional change improves long‑term transparency without ensuring prompt incident‑level disclosures in the weeks after any given shooting ^{[6] [7]}.

4. Case‑level investigative reports: opaque, staggered, often redacted

Reporting on federal task‑force shootings from 2018–2022 shows that journalists and public‑records requesters commonly obtain prosecutors’ justification letters, shooting reviews, and other investigative documents but encounter heavy redactions, variable completeness, and uneven timing; NBC News found many such documents were obtained only by persistent records work and in some incidents only minimal documentation was publicly available ^[3].

5. Independent databases fill gaps but don’t replace formal forensic releases

Private efforts such as The Washington Post’s Fatal Force database began compiling incident details in 2015 from news, records and social media to compensate for federal under‑reporting; those databases provide near‑real‑time incident tallies but are not substitutes for formal FBI or coroner forensic reports, and the Post’s effort also underscored that official reporting pipelines often lag or omit cases entirely ^{[8] [6]}.

6. How long disclosure has taken in practice: wide range, from days to years

Source material documents a broad distribution: aggregate FBI releases are published on multi‑year schedules as data matures and participation grows ^{[1] [2]}, NVDRS compiles reports state‑by‑state depending on capacity ^[4], and investigative documents at the case level have been released to reporters after months of records requests or legal processes—with NBC’s five‑year federal shootings review turning up many documents only after targeted public‑records efforts and with many redactions remaining ^[3]. None of the provided sources gives a comprehensive median timeline for disclosure, so precise average delays cannot be calculated from these materials.

7. What this pattern means for public accountability

The available reporting implies that medical‑forensic information can illuminate cases when coroners publish findings and when journalists or researchers secure investigative files, but systemic under‑reporting, voluntary federal data submission, and frequent redactions create long waits and inconsistent transparency; reform efforts after high‑profile incidents have improved databases and attention but have not produced uniform, rapid public release of FBI‑level or forensic case reports ^{[1] [6] [3] [4]}.