Overall Arrests

Arrest Rate (per 1k residents)

Black Arrest Rate

Category Metrics

Use the selection in the top left to select the category of interest.

Agency Map

Select the crime category you wish to map.

Additional Agency Data

Trend Plots

Metrics by Race

All Offenses

Selected Category

Trends by Race

All Crimes

Selected Crime Category

Metrics

Comparative

All Offenses

Selected Category

Trends

All Crimes

Selected Crime Category

Police departments serving similar communities

The most similar police departments based on demographic attributes such as age, race, unemployment rate, population size, and education level of the population. These police departments were identified using a nearest-neighbors algorithm.

Projecting Arrest Rates

Plot shows the actual arrest rate alongside the most likely estimated arrest rate (shaded area) for each year. A projection forward based on a statistical model, details in the About the Data page, is highlighted in orange.

Many data points lying outside of the gray area suggest that the projections for this police department may be inaccurate. Many points inside the gray area suggest the projections will be accurate.

Leaderboard

About the Uniform Crime Report Data

What is the UCR?

There are over 18,000 independent police agencies in the U.S. Annually, the U.S. spends $120 billion on police protection, with over two-thirds of those expenditures coming from local revenue sources. On average, police protection costs about $275 per person annually. (All data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program provides uniform, consistent data on the activity of police departments and their use of these funds. It is administered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The UCR collects summary statistics on crimes known to the police, arrests, and law enforcement officers killed and assaulted. It has a uniform definition of crimes and police activities to allow for comparison over time and across jurisdictions.

The program was created by the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 1929 as a voluntary collection of data to produce reliable and uniform crime statistics (the FBI took over the program the following year). Today, the FBI uses the data collected by the UCR to produce summary publications describing the state of crime in the U.S. Though the collection is voluntary, over 18,000 city, university/college, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies participate.

Details on the program can be found on the program’s homepage..

What can the UCR tell us?

The UCR provides information on police, criminal activity, and public safety. This information includes:

• The size and composition of police forces
• The prevalence of crimes reported to the police and rates at which police departments “clear”” them
• The race, age, and gender of all arrestees by the type of offense committed
• The value of property stolen or damaged and the amount that police were able to recover

This prototype only incorporates data on arrestees and their offenses at present.

Here are just some of the questions that could be answered using UCR data:

1. How many police officers are there in my town?
2. How many more arrests did the police make for drug offenses than for assault?
3. How many more non-white people were arrested for drug offenses than white people?
4. How many burglaries occurred per 1,000 people in my town last year? How does this compare to nearby towns, to my state, and to the nation?
5. What percentage of vandalisms reported to police did the police later clear?

And here are some questions we can answer by combining the UCR data with Census data:

1. What is the overrepresentation of minority groups in arrests compared to their share of the population?
2. How does the arrest rate for non-violent offenses in my town compare to towns across the country that have similar socioeconomic conditions?
3. How frequently do police make marijuana arrests of different population groups in my community compared to neighboring communities?

Why not just use the data from cities themselves?

Three reasons:

1. Cities have more control over definitions, collection procedures, and reporting of data for collections that do not have a uniform standard. This makes comparisons between cities difficult if not impossible to do in an authoritative way. In contrast, the UCR attempts to provide a standard, uniform method of categorizing crimes and arrests, making comparisons across jurisdictions possible.
2. Only some cities possess the resources to develop, maintain, and curate their own additional data collection beyond the UCR. Outside of the largest 100 or so police departments, the UCR is the only data collection that is consistently available to members of the public.
3. Cities are already participating in and using the UCR and it represents an existing investment in data collection. Use of this collection will increase its relevance.

Why the UCR matters?

The power in the UCR comes not from the depth of the data it collects, but from the breadth. Only the UCR allows us to draw meaningful comparisons over time and across jurisdictions.

Doesn’t the FBI already publish these data?

The FBI publishes the raw data (see below) as well as an annual report on crime in the U.S. However, the annual report does not provide data at a local level.

Additionally, the content of the FBI annual report varies from year to year depending on the administration and its political priorities related to criminal justice reform.

Finally, the FBI makes comparison among jurisdictions difficult as a matter of policy; see the disclaimers below.

Disclaimers and limitations of the UCR

Like all national data collections, the UCR is slower than local reporting. The latest UCR data available are from 2015 or 2016. As such, the UCR is not well suited to analyzing the effects of very recent policy changes or short-term fluctuations in the activity and outputs of police departments.

The FBI cautions about drawing conclusions from local data and has an official statement on the use of UCR that includes the following disclaimer:

“Because of concern regarding the proper use of UCR data, the FBI has the following policies:

• The FBI does not analyze, interpret, or publish crime statistics based solely on a single-dimension interagency ranking.
• The FBI does not provide agency-based crime statistics to data users in a ranked format.
• When providing/using agency-oriented statistics, the FBI cautions and, in fact, strongly discourages, data users against using rankings to evaluate locales or the effectiveness of their law enforcement agencies.”

The FBI encourages users to consider the following factors that contribute to the prevalence of crime and variation in police activity from locale to locale, again from the FBI statement on proper use of UCR statistics:

• Population density and degree of urbanization.
• Variations in composition of the population, particularly youth concentration.
• Stability of the population with respect to residents; mobility, commuting patterns, and transient factors.
• Economic conditions, including median income, poverty level, and job availability.
• Modes of transportation and highway systems.
• Cultural factors and educational, recreational, and religious characteristics.
• Family conditions with respect to divorce and family cohesiveness.
• Climate.
• Effective strength of law enforcement agencies.
• Administrative and investigative emphases on law enforcement.
• Policies of other components of the criminal justice system (i.e., prosecutorial, judicial, correctional, and probational).
• Citizens’ attitudes toward crime.
• Crime reporting practices of the citizenry.

UCR Sources

The canonical source of agency-level UCR data is the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NAJCD). The NAJCD collects, curates, updates, and maintains archival data collections for many crime and justice collection programs, including the UCR.

The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data is a program sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the United States Department of Justice.

The NAJCD is part of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a research center at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) located at the University of Michigan.

Citations

Census Data

Census data (on population and for matching demographically similar communities):

Minnesota Population Center. National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 11.0 [Database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. 2016. http://doi.org/10.18128/D050.V11.0 Available online at: https://www.nhgis.org/

Supplemental Arrest Data

Gaps in the UCR data were filled in by acquiring data directly from states with missing data.

DC https://mpdc.dc.gov/node/1179346 Accessed 6-25-2017

Florida Florida Arrest Data by Jurisdiction sourced directly from Florida Department of Law Enforcement Accessed: 06/12/2017

http://www.fdle.state.fl.us/cms/FSAC/Data-Statistics/UCR-Arrest-Data.aspx

Illinois Crime data supplemental accessed for Illinois on June 25th, 2017 http://www.isp.state.il.us/crime/cii2015.cfm

UCR Data

The bulk of the data in this prototype is derived from the Uniform Crime Report Arrests by Age, Sex, and Race series. These data are available from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data.

United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2016. Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data: Arrests by Age, Sex, and Race, United States, 1980-2014. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor].

A list of DOIs for each annual file is here:

• 10.3886/ICPSR23321, 1980
• 10.3886/ICPSR23325, 1982
• 10.3886/ICPSR23323, 1981
• 10.3886/ICPSR23327, 1983
• 10.3886/ICPSR23329, 1984
• 10.3886/ICPSR23331, 1985
• 10.3886/ICPSR23335, 1987
• 10.3886/ICPSR23333, 1986
• 10.3886/ICPSR23337, 1988
• 10.3886/ICPSR23339, 1989
• 10.3886/ICPSR23341, 1990
• 10.3886/ICPSR23343, 1991
• 10.3886/ICPSR23345, 1992
• 10.3886/ICPSR23347, 1993
• 10.3886/ICPSR23361, 1994
• 10.3886/ICPSR23362, 1995
• 10.3886/ICPSR23363, 1996
• 10.3886/ICPSR23364, 1997
• 10.3886/ICPSR23365, 1998
• 10.3886/ICPSR23366, 1999
• 10.3886/ICPSR03997, 2000
• 10.3886/ICPSR03729, 2001
• 10.3886/ICPSR04068, 2002
• 10.3886/ICPSR27651, 2003
• 10.3886/ICPSR04461, 2004
• 10.3886/ICPSR04716, 2005
• 10.3886/ICPSR22405, 2006
• 10.3886/ICPSR25106, 2007
• 10.3886/ICPSR27643, 2008
• 10.3886/ICPSR30762, 2009
• 10.3886/ICPSR33522, 2010
• 10.3886/ICPSR34581, 2011
• 10.3886/ICPSR35018, 2012
• 10.3886/ICPSR36116, 2013
• 10.3886/ICPSR36400, 2014
• 10.3886/ICPSR36794, 2015

Definitions of Metrics

Police Departments Included

Police departments are included if they reported at least 1 arrest in 2014 and can be matched to a corresponding Census unit, such as a metropolitan area. There are 4,296 police departments that meet these criteria.

---

Arrest Data Definitions

Arrest Counts

The UCR defines an arrest as when police take someone into custody on suspicion of a crime. Each arrest is top coded, meaning that, while an individual may be arrested on multiple charges, in the UCR data, the arrest is coded based on the most severe crime charged.

Arrest Rates

The FBI measures crime rates per 1,000 residents. The same denominator is used here. Since a single individual can be arrested multiple times, and arrests within a jurisdiction may include individuals who are not residents of that jurisdiction, it is possible for there to be more arrests than residents in a jurisdiction.

Racial and Juvenile Disparities

The racial disparity in arrest rates is calculated by comparing the count of white arrestees per 1,000 white residents to the count of black arrestees per 1,000 black residents. Racial makeup of the community is estimated using U.S. Census data for the micropolitan area most closely matching the arresting police department. The juvenile-adult disparity in arrest rates is calculated by comparing the number of arrestees under age 18 to the number of adult arrestees. In both cases, the number of residents in each age category – that is, the denominator in the rate calculation – is approximated using Census data. The under-18 population is approximated using the Census category of 15- to 24-year-olds, while the adult population is approximated using the age 25 and over Census category.

---

Crime Category Definitions

In the UCR data, each arrest is top coded, meaning that, while an individual may be arrested on multiple charges, the arrest is coded based on the most severe crime charged. As a result, the arrest numbers for the most severe crimes – major crimes, as defined by the FBI – are the most accurate. All other categories of arrests are, therefore, likely underestimated since arrests for these crimes sometimes accompany other, more severe crimes.

Categories

This tool divides crimes into four categories:

• Serious crimes = FBI Part I crimes (see list below)
• Drug crimes = FBI drug crimes, including marijuana crimes
• Other crimes = FBI Part II crimes (see list below), excluding drug crimes
• Marijuana crimes = Possession, sale, and distribution of marijuana

The FBI defines Part I (serious) crime as the following offense categories:

• Criminal homicide (murder and nonnegligent manslaughter)
• Forcible rape
• Robbery
• Aggravated Assault
• Burglary (breaking and entering)
• Larceny (theft)
• Motor vehicle theft
• Arson

Part II offenses are less serious crimes for which less detailed data is collected:

• Simple assault - no weapon or serious injury to the victim
• Forgery and counterfeiting
• Fraud
• Embezzlement
• Stolen property
• Vandalism
• Weapons
• Prostitution / commercialized vice
• Sex offenses (stautory rape included here)
• Drug abuse violations
• Gambling
• Crimes against the family and children (nonviolent crimes against family)
• Driving under the influence
• Liquor laws
• Drunkenness
• Disorderly conduct
• Vagrancy
• All other offenses (except traffic violations)
• Suspicion (arrest for no specific offense and release with no formal charges)
• Curfew and loitering (under age 18)
• Runaways (under age 18)

Full details available from the FBI here.