Social Explorer’s comprehensive crime dataset features new levels of detailed data. Compiled and vetted by data and subject matter experts, the release empowers users to analyze crime data across the country down to the block group level. This dataset covers violent and property crimes and offers unique crime indices to enable superior comparisons and analyses.
Our Extensive Crime Data and Tools:
Social Explorer’s crime dataset includes seven individual crime-type indices (Murder, Rape and Sexual Assault, Robbery, Felonious Assault, Burglary, Grand Larceny, Grand Larceny Auto) and three composite indices to help summarize and compare (Total Crime Index, Violent Crime Index, and Property Crime Index). The index is available nationally and on block group, census tract, zip code, place, county, and state levels. Each index range is 0 to 200, centered around a national median of 100.
How Social Explorer Made the Crime Dataset:
The combination of real local data plus a transparent method sets Social Explorer’s crime data apart. In constructing this dataset, Social Explorer collected real incident-level data from individual police departments’ crime data portals for 51 source cities and 109 additional covered places (160 Census places, about 46.4 million residents). The major city portals included New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Diego, Dallas, Jacksonville, Austin, and dozens more. View the full list of cities and more details in our data documentation.
Most other crime data providers repackage the FBI's aggregate reports and then use statistical models to estimate neighborhood risk. Social Explorer is the only provider that collects real, geocoded incident data directly from city police portals and combines it with a fully documented, validated national model for everywhere else.
Social Explorer processed the detailed locations of the crime data, where available, enabling more precise geolocation information than NIBRS provides. The data was then harmonized to reconcile different crime classification standards and levels of precision, ensuring consistent detail and accurate comparisons across geographical levels. Our team of data engineers and scientists brought this data together with assistance from criminal justice professors and experts to create a unified dataset.
Building on that expertise and modeling, Social Explorer developed strategies to fill in areas where detailed point data is not yet available. In consultation with subject matter experts and data scientists, Social Explorer used machine learning trained on the cities already ingested and processed. We created the block-group-level estimates by disaggregating data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) jurisdiction-level totals available from over 16,500 agencies across the nation. The disaggregation was done using sophisticated machine learning algorithms trained on granular city data, with over 100 demographic, retail, and other crime-specific predictors, and constrained to match the official NIBRS agency totals exactly. This multi-tiered approach provides block-group-level granularity nationwide while maintaining consistency with officially reported crime counts. (Note: Most cities geocode to the 100th block or nearest intersection, not the exact address, which can create spatial imprecision at the block level.)
With this combined approach, the Social Explorer crime dataset achieves nearly nationwide coverage of 332 million people (only a small number of geographies that have a population less than 50 are suppressed).
What Makes the Crime Dataset Unique:
Currently-available crime data and related research is limited in many ways. Before this Social Explorer crime set, researchers would need to examine the FBI's Uniform Crime Report data, NIBRS data, or local city/municipal portals for each location on their own.
Criminal justice professors and experts helped the Social Explorer team reconcile different crime codes between NIBRS and individual city portals. Bridging data from these different portals and classifications (such as decoding multiple names for one type of crime) makes Social Explorer’s crime dataset unique in its comprehensiveness.
Additionally, Social Explorer identified gaps in crime data reporting, such as a lack of crime data in New Orleans according to the federal NIBRS dataset. (New Orleans is one of the cities whose transition to NIBRS has lagged.) New Orleans does have a local crime data portal, which Social Explorer sought out and collected data from to give users a more accurate picture of the crime in that city, all the way down to the neighborhood level.
Social Explorer’s Crime Data is the most comprehensive, current and transparent dataset available.
Example: Denver, Colorado
Social Explorer’s crime data brings deeper insights to analysis and comparison. A closeup on Denver, Colorado, shows the picture of crime overall, plus opportunities for greater detail. Denver's Total Crime Index number is 180.7, making it possible to quickly compare it to the national number (100) and other cities. Denver has the 16th highest crime index of major US cities.
Explore the following map to view the total crime index throughout the city, all the way down to the block group level.
As the map shows, the Downtown and Five Points/Cole neighborhoods tend to have the highest crime index values. Outer residential tracts (southeast and southwest Denver) typically show lower index values.
Social Explorer offers composite indices, like Total Crime, as well as detailed property and violent crime indices. Comparing the different crime indices, we quickly see that the Grand Larceny Auto Index (189.4) and the Burglary Index (181.2) are especially notable for the city.
Social Explorer users can bring together other datasets to deepen their research and understanding of cities, issues, context, and solutions. Our extensive Data Library includes the latest American Community Survey data, Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy (CHAS) for 2009 to 2022, the Social Vulnerability Index (2022), Local Area Unemployment Statistics (1976 to 2026), and so much more!
Add Social Explorer Crime Data to Your Toolkit
Social Explorer offers users our trusted, comprehensive data to help make more thorough and current crime data analyses. Key audiences include planning professionals, criminal justice researchers, students, community advocates, grantwriters, real estate professionals and more.
Dive into Social Explorer’s new crime dataset right now! More detailed crime data will also be released in version two later this year. Please feel free to inquire about the underlying crime rates that the index is derived from as well.
Sign up for a free Social Explorer account to try it out today.