A newer version of this project is available. See below for other available versions.

Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program Data: Arrests by Age, Sex, and Race, 1974-2016

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Jacob Kaplan, University of Pennsylvania

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
ucr_arrests_monthly_1974_2016_dta.zip	application/zip	929.3 MB	12/27/2018 06:22:PM
ucr_arrests_monthly_1974_2016_rda.zip	application/zip	832.1 MB	12/27/2018 11:10:AM
ucr_arrests_yearly_1974_2016_dta.zip	application/zip	914.6 MB	12/28/2018 04:56:PM

Project Citation:

Kaplan, Jacob. Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program Data: Arrests by Age, Sex, and Race, 1974-2016. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2018-12-29. https://doi.org/10.3886/E102263V7

Project Description

Summary:

Version 7 release notes:

Adds 1974-1979 data
Adds monthly data (only totals by sex and race, not by age-categories). Only Stata files are available to reduce the amount of files uploaded here, email me for R files.
All data now from FBI, not NACJD. See here for the R code I used to read in the files and clean data, and the setup files made to read them in. https://github.com/jacobkap/crime_data
Changes some column names so all columns are <=32 characters to be usable in Stata.
Changes how number of months reported is calculated. Now it is the number of unique months with arrest data reported - months of data from the monthly header file (i.e. juvenile disposition data) are not considered in this calculation.

Version 6 release notes:

Fix bug where juvenile female columns had the same value as juvenile male columns.

Version 5 release notes:

Removes support for SPSS and Excel data.
Changes the crimes that are stored in each file. There are more files now with fewer crimes per file. The files and their included crimes have been updated below.
Adds in agencies that report 0 months of the year.
Adds a column that indicates the number of months reported. This is generated summing up the number of unique months an agency reports data for. Note that this indicates the number of months an agency reported arrests for ANY crime. They may not necessarily report every crime every month. Agencies that did not report a crime with have a value of NA for every arrest column for that crime.
Removes data on runaways.

Version 4 release notes:

Changes column names from "poss_coke" and "sale_coke" to "poss_heroin_coke" and "sale_heroin_coke" to clearly indicate that these column includes the sale of heroin as well as similar opiates such as morphine, codeine, and opium. Also changes column names for the narcotic columns to indicate that they are only for synthetic narcotics.

Version 3 release notes:

Add data for 2016.
Order rows by year (descending) and ORI.

Version 2 release notes:

Fix bug where Philadelphia Police Department had incorrect FIPS county code.

The Arrests by Age, Sex, and Race (ASR) data is an FBI data set that is part of the annual Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program data. This data contains highly granular data on the number of people arrested for a variety of crimes (see below for a full list of included crimes). The data sets here combine data from the years 1974-2016 into a single file for each group of crimes. Each monthly file is only a single year as my laptop can't handle combining all the years together. These files are quite large and may take some time to load.

All the data was is from the FBI and read into R using the package asciiSetupReader. All work to clean the data and save it in various file formats was also done in R. For the R code used to clean this data, see here. https://github.com/jacobkap/crime_data.

Columns are crime-arrest category units. For example, If you choose the data set that includes murder, you would have rows for each agency-year/month and columns with the number of people arrests for murder. The ASR data breaks down arrests by age and gender (e.g. Male aged 15, Male aged 18). They also provide the number of adults or juveniles arrested by race. Because most agencies and years do not report the arrestee's ethnicity (Hispanic or not Hispanic) I do not include these columns.

To make it easier to merge with other data, I merged this data with the Law Enforcement Agency Identifiers Crosswalk (LEAIC) data. The data from the LEAIC add FIPS codes (state, county, and place).

I created 9 arrest categories myself. The categories are:

Total Male Juvenile
Total Female Juvenile
Total Male Adult
Total Female Adult
Total Male
Total Female
Total Juvenile
Total Adult
Total Arrests

All of these categories are based on the sums of the sex-age categories (e.g. Male under 10, Female aged 22) rather than using the provided age-race categories (e.g. adult Black, juvenile Asian). As not all agencies report the race data, this method is more accurate. I also made total race categories by adding the juvenile and adult count for each race.

As the arrest data is very granular, and each category of arrest is its own column, there are dozens of columns per crime. To keep the data somewhat manageable, there are eight different files, seven which contain different crimes and the "all " file. Each file contains the data for all years. The seven categories each have crimes belonging to a major crime category and do not overlap in crimes other than with the index offenses. Please note that the crime names provided below are not the same as the column names in the data. Due to Stata limiting column names to 32 characters maximum, I have abbreviated the crime names in the data. The files and their included crimes are:

Index Crimes

Murder
Rape
Robbery
Aggravated Assault
Burglary
Theft
Motor Vehicle Theft
Arson

Drug Crimes

Total Drug
Total Drug Sales
Total Drug Possession
Cannabis Possession
Cannabis Sales
Heroin or Cocaine Possession
Heroin or Cocaine Sales
Other Drug Possession
Other Drug Sales
Synthetic Narcotic Possession
Synthetic Narcotic Sales

Alcohol or Property Crimes

DUI
Drunkenness
Liquor
Forgery
Fraud
Stolen Property

Financial Crimes

Embezzlement
Total Gambling
Other Gambling
Bookmaking
Numbers Lottery

Sex or Family Crimes

Offenses Against the Family and Children
Other Sex Offenses
Prostitution
Rape

Violent Crimes

Aggravated Assault
Murder
Negligent Manslaughter
Robbery
Weapon Offenses

Other Crimes

Curfew
Disorderly Conduct
Other Non-traffic
Suspicion
Vandalism
Vagrancy

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: arrest; arrest rates; Uniform Crime Reports; FBI; UCR; crime; crime statistics; arrest statistics

Geographic Coverage: United States

Time Period(s): 1974 – 2016

Universe: Police agencies in the United States

Data Type(s): administrative records data

Methodology

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

Unit(s) of Observation: Police Agency

Geographic Unit: Police agency jurisdiction

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