Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data: Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) 1975-2015

Summary:  View help for Summary The LEOKA data sets are highly detailed data about the number of officers/civilians employed by an agency and how many officers were killed or assaulted. Each data set contains over 2,200 columns and has a wealth of information about the circumstances of assaults on officers.

All the data was downloaded from NACJD as ASCII+SPSS Setup files and cleaned using R. The "cleaning" just means that column names were standardized (different years have slightly different spellings for many columns). Standardization of column names is necessary to stack multiple years together. Categorical variables (e.g. state) were also standardized (i.e. fix spelling errors). The columns employees_per_1k_pop and officers_per_1k_pop were incorrect in the original data, showing the number of employees/officers per 10k population rather than 1k population. This was fixed.

I did not make any changes to the numeric columns except for the following. A few years of data had the values "blank" or "missing" as indicators of missing values. Rows in otherwise numeric columns (e.g. jan_asslt_no_injury_knife) with these values were replaced with NA.  No other changes to numeric columns were made.

Each zip file contains all years as individual files of the specified data type. Please note that each file is quite large (2,200+ columns) so it may take time to download the zip file and open each data file.

For the R code used to clean this data, see here. https://github.com/jacobkap/crime_data.

The UCR Handbook (https://ucr.fbi.gov/additional-ucr-publications/ucr_handbook.pdf/view) describes the LEOKA data as follows:

"The UCR Program collects data from all contributing agencies ... on officer line-of-duty deaths and assaults. Reporting agencies must submit data on ... their own duly sworn officers feloniously or accidentally killed or assaulted in the line of duty. The purpose of this data collection is to identify situations in which officers are killed or assaulted, describe the incidents statistically, and publish the data to aid agencies in developing policies to improve officer safety.

"... agencies must record assaults on sworn officers. Reporting agencies must count all assaults that resulted in serious injury or assaults in which a weapon was used that could have caused serious injury or death. They must include other assaults not causing injury if the assault involved more than mere verbal abuse or minor resistance to an arrest. In other words, agencies must include in this section all assaults on officers, whether or not the officers sustained injuries."

Subject Terms:  View help for Subject Terms leoka; police safety; police; ucr; Uniform Crime Reports

Geographic Coverage:  View help for Geographic Coverage United States

Time Period(s):  View help for Time Period(s) 1975 – 2015

Universe:  View help for Universe Law enforcement agencies in the United States.

Data Type(s):  View help for Data Type(s) administrative records data

Data Source:  View help for Data Source United States Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation

Unit(s) of Observation:  View help for Unit(s) of Observation Police agency

Geographic Unit:  View help for Geographic Unit Police agency jurisdiction