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Social Explorer Becomes Exclusive Provider of Reliable U.S. Crime Data
MONDAY, SEP 02, 2024
Social Explorer has become the nation’s pre-eminent provider of U.S. crime data with the acquisition of cutting-edge methodology created by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).
National crime data collected by the FBI has traditionally been problematic, both because of methodology and reporting issues by the nation’s law enforcement agencies. The FBI data, collected as part of the Uniform Crime Report (UCR), generally only reports one crime per incident, and participation has often been spotty.
The FBI has acknowledged issues by creating the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to standardize reporting and collect more data, including 52 crimes across two dozen categories. The new system, however, only covers two-thirds of the U.S. population, including none of Florida and only 7 percent of California. It also limits use to crime rates at state, county, and agency levels.
The ICPSR, based at the University of Michigan, attempted to remedy crime data shortcomings by creating its own methodology that imputed data to provide a more accurate and up-to-date study of violent and non-violent U.S. crime. The Social Explorer acquisition of the ICPSR methodology, combined with the NBIRS data, uses the company’s proprietary online mapping and reporting tools to provide crime data for multiple geographies, including states, counties, Census tracts, and Census block groups.
The new Social Explorer data allows users to study both the number and rates of crimes per 100,000 people. The violent crime categories include murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults; the non-violent (property) crimes include burglaries, larcenies, motor vehicle thefts, and arson.
