Calling the Police: Citizen Reporting of Serious Crime, 1979 (ICPSR 8185)

Principal Investigator(s): Spelman, William; Brown, Dale K.

Summary: This dataset replicates the citizen reporting component of POLICE RESPONSE TIME ANALYSIS, 1975 (ICPSR 7760). Information is included on 4,095 reported incidents of aggravated assault, auto theft, burglary, larceny/theft offenses, forcible rape, and robbery. The data cover citizen calls to police between April 21 and December 7, 1979. There are four files in this collection, one each for Jacksonville, Florida, Peoria, Illinois, Rochester, New York, and San Diego, California. The data are t... (more info)

• One or more data files in this study are set up in a non-standard format, such as card image format. Users may need help converting these files before they can be used for analysis.

• This data is freely available.

Spelman, William, and Dale K. Brown. CALLING THE POLICE: CITIZEN REPORTING OF SERIOUS CRIME, 1979. ICPSR version. Washington, DC: Police Executive Research Forum [producer], 1980. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2002. doi:10.3886/ICPSR08185.v1

Persistent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08185.v1

Export Citation:

• RIS (generic format for RefWorks, EndNote, etc.)
• EndNote XML (EndNote X4.0.1 or higher)

This survey was funded by:

• United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. National Institute of Justice (78-NI-AX-0107)

Summary:   This dataset replicates the citizen reporting component of POLICE RESPONSE TIME ANALYSIS, 1975 (ICPSR 7760). Information is included on 4,095 reported incidents of aggravated assault, auto theft, burglary, larceny/theft offenses, forcible rape, and robbery. The data cover citizen calls to police between April 21 and December 7, 1979. There are four files in this collection, one each for Jacksonville, Florida, Peoria, Illinois, Rochester, New York, and San Diego, California. The data are taken from police dispatch records and police interviews of citizens who requested police assistance. Variables taken from the dispatch records include the dispatch time, call priority, police travel time, age, sex, and race of the caller, response code, number of suspects, and area of the city in which the call originated. Variables taken from the citizen interviews include respondent's role in the incident (victim, caller, victim-caller, witness-caller), incident location, relationship of caller to victim, number of victims, identification of suspect, and interaction with police.

Subject Terms:   assault, auto theft, burglary, citizen crime reporting, larceny, offenses, police citizen interactions, police protection, police reports, rape, robbery, victims, witnesses

Geographic Coverage:   California, Florida, Illinois, Jacksonville, New York (state), Peoria, Rochester, San Diego, United States

Time Period:  

• 1979-04-21--1979-12-07

Date of Collection:  

• 1979-04-21--1979-12-07

Data Types:   administrative records data

Data Collection Notes:

The codebook is provided by ICPSR as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file. The PDF file format was developed by Adobe Systems Incorporated and can be accessed using PDF reader software, such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Information on how to obtain a copy of the Acrobat Reader is provided on the ICPSR Web site.

Original ICPSR Release:  1985-03-18

Version History:

• 2006-01-18 File CB8185.ALL.PDF was removed from any previous datasets and flagged as a study-level file, so that it will accompany all downloads.

Use any of the notification links to add this study to your RSS feed; you will then receive notification if the study is substantively updated.

• Citations exports are provided above.

• Export Study-level metadata (does not include variable-level metadata)

  • DDI Codebook or DDI Lifecycle

  • Dublin Core

  • MARC21 XML

  • DataCite XML

If you're looking for collection-level metadata rather than an individual metadata record, please visit our Metadata Records page.

• View Usage of this Study