The refusal to repeat a suspect’s name is not universal. At the news conference following the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue last fall that left 11 people dead, for instance, the authorities said the suspect’s name multiple times. And some people believe that decisions by law enforcement to avoid naming assailants make little difference, particularly for relatives of the victims.

“Not saying his name is not going to take away anything that happened,” said the Rev. Sharon Risher, whose mother died in the attack on a church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. Ms. Risher said that she makes certain to mention Dylann Roof, the gunman who was sentenced to death in January 2017, during speeches because “you need to know who he is and when this name comes up, the evil this person caused.”

But the approach to not name suspects has recently been more widely embraced, said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum, as chiefs and sheriffs have come to recognize that mass shooters often kill for the sake of attention.

“The sense is that is part of the reason these people do this, so let’s not feed into that,” Mr. Wexler said.

Explicit evidence of “fame seeking” exists for nearly half of the deadliest mass shootings since 2010, according to Adam Lankford, a criminology professor at the University of Alabama, who presented his data at a National Science Foundation workshop in April. His research found that 90 percent of high-fatality shootings have some circumstantial evidence of a desire for attention.

“The evidence supporting these types of strategies is stronger than ever before because we have more cases and more data,” Dr. Lankford said. “And law enforcement is also increasingly desperate to do something that would make a difference.”

Several law enforcement officials said that their departments have no official policy to avoid uttering a suspect’s name. But it has become the custom, or in some cases, an instinct. At a news conference following the shooting at a manufacturing warehouse in Aurora, Ill., last February that left five people dead and five officers wounded, Kristen Ziman, the city’s police chief, avoided naming the killer more than once.