Crime Data Tool (CrimeDataTool.com) was developed in January 2017 to address the lack of an accessible, comprehensive platform for engaging with the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) data—the nation’s primary source of crime data. At the time, existing tools were difficult to use and limited in scope, with fewer crime categories and years of data than in the full data. These constraints made it challenging to access even basic statistics, such as the number of assaults each month within a single police agency over time. The goal of Crime Data Tool is to bridge this gap by making complex crime data accessible and user-friendly. Reliable, interpretable data is essential for effective crime policy and public safety strategies.
Crime Data Tool provides broad access to UCR data, enabling users to visualize and analyze trends in crime, arrests, officer employment, and related areas across various agencies and timeframes. The tool includes data on crimes, arrests, assaults and killings of police officers, and demographic information of individuals involved in crimes, among many other variables.
With Crime Data Tool, users can select the dataset they are interested in, choose a specific police department, and customize the variables they wish to explore (for example, the number of rapes committed by adults or the number of male police officers employed). The platform then generates an interactive graph and table based on the selected data and allows users to download the data for further analysis or reporting.
Crime Data Tool was built to expand access to UCR data, ensuring that valuable information is available beyond just those with technical expertise. While the site currently features comprehensive data from the UCR Program, including the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), it represents only a portion of the available data. Expanding the tool’s capabilities to include more of the UCR’s full potential remains an ongoing goal.
The full version of the data used on this site is available to download on the Harvard Dataverse website here.
Jacob Kaplan, Ph.D., is the creator and developer of Crime Data Tool. He is a Professional Specialist at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and focuses on research related to policing. Dr. Kaplan holds an M.S. and a Ph.D. in criminology from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in criminal justice from Sacramento State. He has authored several R packages and the book A Criminologist's Guide to R: Crime by the Numbers, which was published by CRC Press.
For further information or inquiries, please contact Jacob at jk7785@princeton.edu.
Thank you to Bocar Ba, Kristina Block, Daniel Goldberg, and Jonathan Mummolo for your feedback, suggestions, support, and help on the site.