Crime rate data for American cities

Question

I'm writing a paper and I'm interested in monthly crime rates in American cities.

The FBI database contains only yearly crime rates and it stops at 2012 (http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/), and each individual police station varies in their degree of reporting. Anyone know of dataset that will satisfy my needs?

Can you edit your question to include a link to the FBI database you mention? — philshem, Apr 10 '15 at 21:42
i've got over a decades worth of data for localities in virginia, some of its monthly...so not big cities, but i've got it if you want it — albert, Apr 11 '15 at 03:46
@albert I'm looking for monthly UCR data for state of Virginia, I cant find any source for it. Here is a sample study that uses monthly data from Virginia http://papers.tinbergen.nl/03040.pdf — forecaster, Feb 13 '17 at 16:07
this va crime github repo is really messy...sorry. UCR comes from VSP so I'm assuming the reporting is same/similar. VSP releases annual reports here and i've collected, pulled data out for most in this folder. I think that is what you want. If you need more/have questions, feel free to reach out: jalbertbowden gmail — albert, Feb 13 '17 at 16:52

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 10 '15 at 17:48

This site goes back several decades. Each file is pretty large but also has the data broken down by month. I don't think you'll be able to get around varying degrees of reporting, that's a common problem statisticians have to deal with.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:57

This is similar to another question, and so I'll post a more detailed and updated answer here that might be useful, too.

There are quite a few cities that publish this data. A quick way to find it, is via Data.gov, which provides local government as well as federal government data. There are 40 city crime statistics datasets published, most of which include location data:

All 40 city crime datasets, which are from 11 cities, but broken down by multiple factors for better analysis
As an example, Chicago's crime data includes crimes from 2001 to the present

There is also a large set of data about sexual assaults, particularly but not exclusively on college campuses.

Crime rate data for American cities

2 Answers2