Local, county, and state police departments across the country voluntarily report aggregate numbers for different categories of crime in their jurisdictions. The Uniform Crime Reports, comprised of six databases, includes crime information reported to the FBI by law enforcement agencies around the country. Most of the data consist of the "index" crimes: murder, nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, motor-vehicle theft and arson. These crimes, with the exception of arson, were chosen in 1929 to serve as an index for gauging fluctuations in the overall volume and rate of crime. Arson was added by Congressional mandate in 1979.
The six databases of the Uniform Crime Report include: Return-A, Return-A Supplement, Supplemental Homicide Report (SHR), Police, Arson and Age, Sex and Race (ASR also known as Arrests). Each database, with the exception of SHR, is arranged by police reporting agencies. Occurrences are presented as aggregates. The data is broken down by month. All the databases provide the region, state, county, city, metropolitan statistical area (MSA) and reporting agency identifier.
This version of the dataset, available only from Investigative Reporters and Editors in partnership with ProPublica, is an analysis-ready version of the data provided by the FBI, pre-processed as CSV or SQL files. (While the source data comes as unpacked, fixed-width .DAT files on a disc, IRE has processed the files to slice the fixed-width data into columns and, in the ASR and Return A tables, processed hexadecimal numbers into their true negative values.) Additional data years, from 1993 to 2013, are also available upon request.
Provided in collaboration with Investigative Reporters and Editors
