Codebook for "Creating a UCR Utility"

• NCJ Number: 215342
• Author(s): Michael D. Maltz; Harald E. Weiss
• Date Published: June 2006
• Length: 16 pages
• Grant Number(s): 2004-IJ-CX-0083
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Instructional Material

Annotation

This report provides a codebook for accessing and adding to a new Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) utility of cleaned UCR data.

Abstract

As part of a grant project with the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), researchers cleaned the data found in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) in order to present a usable version of the crime data for research and policy purposes. Four deliverable items were provided to the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) as the work product of this grant: (1) cleaned UCR data for the 50 States and the District of Columbia; (2) a UCR charting utility to allow users to plot monthly crime data; (3) a set of instructions to allow the addition of subsequent years of data; and (4) an analysis of the nature and extent of “missingness” in the UCR data. This report provides the set of instructions to allow the addition of subsequent years of cleaned UCR data. Instructions are offered for running the plotting utility and worksheet definitions in State data files are presented. The instructions also convey State abbreviations, missingness codes and colors, the population worksheet, the months reported worksheet, the covering originating agency identifier’s (ORI’s) worksheet, the group worksheet, the SMSA worksheet, the crime category worksheet, and the revisions worksheet. Exhibits