Research: Criminal Justice Data & Statistics: About Criminal Justice Data &amp; Statistics

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Criminology and Criminal Justice
by BU Libraries Last Updated Jan 10, 2025 452 views this year

About Criminal Justice Data & Statistics

This guide provides links to selected sources of data and statistics for Criminal Justice. Suggestions for additional data categories or for data, data sets, or statistics that may have been missed would be appreciated.

Featured Articles

What Can FBI Data Say About Crime in 2021? It’s Too Unreliable to Tell (The Marshall Project) Nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country did not submit any data in 2021 to a newly revised FBI crime statistics collection program, leaving a massive gap in information sure to be exploited by politicians in midterm election campaigns already dominated by public fear over a rise in violent crime.

"The FBI’s Next Set of Crime Data Is Going to Be a Big Mess," The Atlantic, 10 May 2022 Whatever numbers the FBI releases, they are unlikely to provide the clarity into crime trends that the public deserves. And that’s because of a recent, and significant, change to how the FBI collects crime data. As a result, saying with any confidence whether crime is up or down may be virtually impossible.

See also:

Understanding National Crime Data: A comparison of data from the FBI and the National Crime Victimization Survey (Vera Institute of Justice) The narrative that the United States is in a historic violent crime wave has landed with some voters and reflects how media coverage of crime shapes public perception and people’s sense of safety. The most frequently cited national crime data comes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), though it is not the only government data source. As many researchers and journalists have cautioned, the FBI’s police-reported crime data is troubled by inaccuracies and incomplete
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coverage. This brief explains why the FBI data is an inconclusive measure of crime in the United States and presents analysis of an additional, less-discussed source of crime data: the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).
Using Open Web-based Crime Data for Research: A Word of Caution - Research Note." International Journal of Social Research Methodology 24, no. 6 (2021): 767-73. In the digital age, where every click, purchase, or activity is systematically recorded, it is surprising to discover how difficult it still is to assemble crime data. This paper describes available web-based crime mapping services and discusses some of the key advantages and disadvantages of using this source for both general purposes and scholarly endeavors. Using a research project on crime occurring around train stations as a case study, we illustrate the pitfalls of relying on web-based services compared to requesting crime information directly from law enforcement agencies. We conclude with a few cautionary remarks regarding the use of data services that purport to offer an assemblage of crime data drawn from different jurisdictions.

Featured Report

The Power and Problem of Criminal Justice Data: A Twenty-State Review Measures for Justice collected data from twenty states that have centralized data systems, ostensibly allowing for the most complete picture of state criminal court systems.
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After a decade’s worth of data collection and engagement with county agencies and state courts, it’s become abundantly clear to us that willing and motivated communities simply do not have enough access to their own data to start making sense of what’s happening in their local criminal justice systems. In some cases, the data aren’t there—no one collects them. In other cases, the data are there but are protected by law or administrative discre- tion. Finally, the data are sometimes just too incomplete or messy to use—missing data fields, inconsistent taxonomies, or, sadly, handwriting no one can read.

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This guide was originally authored by Chris Smith, April, 2023.