Jacob Kaplan's Concatenated Files: Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program Data: Arrests by Age, Sex, and Race, 1974-2021

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
ucr_arrests_monthly_alcohol_or_property_1974_2020_dta.zip	application/zip	380.5 MB	04/04/2023 07:59:AM
ucr_arrests_monthly_alcohol_or_property_1974_2020_rds.zip	application/zip	375 MB	04/04/2023 07:39:AM
ucr_arrests_monthly_all_crimes_race_sex_1974_2020_dta.zip	application/zip	739.5 MB	04/04/2023 07:58:AM
ucr_arrests_monthly_all_crimes_race_sex_1974_2020_rds.zip	application/zip	890.9 MB	04/04/2023 07:58:AM
ucr_arrests_monthly_drug_1974_2020_dta.zip	application/zip	395.1 MB	04/04/2023 07:28:AM
ucr_arrests_monthly_drug_1974_2020_rds.zip	application/zip	419.3 MB	04/04/2023 07:44:AM
ucr_arrests_monthly_index_1974_2020_dta.zip	application/zip	345.3 MB	04/04/2023 08:21:AM
ucr_arrests_monthly_index_1974_2020_rds.zip	application/zip	341.2 MB	04/04/2023 07:48:AM
ucr_arrests_monthly_other_crimes_1974_2020_dta.zip	application/zip	485.9 MB	04/04/2023 07:35:AM
ucr_arrests_monthly_other_crimes_1974_2020_rds.zip	application/zip	512.9 MB	04/04/2023 07:34:AM

Project Citation:

Kaplan, Jacob. Jacob Kaplan’s Concatenated Files: Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program Data: Arrests by Age, Sex, and Race, 1974-2021. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2023-04-04. https://doi.org/10.3886/E102263V15

Project Description

Summary:

For a comprehensive guide to this data and other UCR data, please see my book at ucrbook.com

Version 15 release notes:

Adds 2021 data.

Version 14 release notes:

Adds 2020 data.
Please note that the FBI has retired UCR data ending in 2020 data so this will be the last Arrests by Age, Sex, and Race data they release.

Version 13 release notes:

Changes R files from .rda to .rds.
Fixes bug where the number_of_months_reported variable incorrectly was the largest of the number of months reported for a specific crime variable. For example, if theft was reported Jan-June and robbery was reported July-December in an agency, in total there were 12 months reported. But since each crime (and let's assume no other crime was reported more than 6 months of the year) only was reported 6 months, the number_of_months_reported variable was incorrectly set at 6 months. Now it is the total number of months reported of any crime. So it would be set to 12 months in this example. Thank you to Nick Eubank for alerting me to this issue.
Adds rows even when a agency reported zero arrests that month; all arrest values are set to zero for these rows.

Version 12 release notes:

Adds 2019 data.

Version 11 release notes:

Changes release notes description, does not change data.

Version 10 release notes:

The data now has the following age categories (which were previously aggregated into larger groups to reduce file size): under 10, 10-12, 13-14, 40-44, 45-49, 50-54, 55-59, 60-64, over 64. These categories are available for female, male, and total (female+male) arrests. The previous aggregated categories (under 15, 40-49, and over 49 have been removed from the data).

Version 9 release notes:

For each offense, adds a variable indicating the number of months that offense was reported - these variables are labeled as "num_months_[crime]" where [crime] is the offense name. These variables are generated by the number of times one or more arrests were reported per month for that crime. For example, if there was at least one arrest for assault in January, February, March, and August (and no other months), there would be four months reported for assault. Please note that this does not differentiate between an agency not reporting that month and actually having zero arrests.

The variable "number_of_months_reported" is still in the data and is the number of months that any offense was reported. So if any agency reports murder arrests every month but no other crimes, the murder number of months variable and the "number_of_months_reported" variable will both be 12 while every other offense number of month variable will be 0.

Adds data for 2017 and 2018.

Version 8 release notes:

Adds annual data in R format.
Changes project name to avoid confusing this data for the ones done by NACJD.
Fixes bug where bookmaking was excluded as an arrest category.
Changed the number of categories to include more offenses per category to have fewer total files. Added a "total_race" file for each category - this file has total arrests by race for each crime and a breakdown of juvenile/adult by race.

Version 7 release notes:

Adds 1974-1979 data
Adds monthly data (only totals by sex and race, not by age-categories).
All data now from FBI, not NACJD.
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 1974-2019 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.

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 five different files, four which contain different crimes and the "all_crimes" file. Each file contains the data for all years. The four 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
Embezzlement
Gambling - Total
Gambling - Other
Gambling - Bookmaking
Gambling - Lottery

Other Crimes

Curfew
Disorderly Conduct
Other Non-traffic
Suspicion
Vandalism
Vagrancy
Offenses Against the Family and Children
Other Sex Offenses
Prostitution
Negligent Manslaughter
Weapon Offenses
Other Assault

These are the age categories, which are also broken up by arrestee gender.

Under 10
10-12
13-14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25-29
30-34
35-39
40-44
45-49
50-54
55-59
60-64
65 and older

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: arrest; arrest rates; Uniform Crime Reports; FBI; UCR; crime; crime statistics; arrest statistics; UCR arrest; Arrests by Age; Arrest by Age Sex and Race

Geographic Coverage: United States

Time Period(s): 1974 – 2021

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

Related Publications

This study is un-published. See below for other available versions.

Published Versions

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