Police Departments, Arrests and Crime in the United States, 1860-1920 (ICPSR 7708)

Version Date: Jan 12, 2006

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Principal Investigator(s):
Eric Monkkonen

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07708.v2

Version V2

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Summary

These data on 19th- and early 20th-century police department and arrest behavior were collected between 1975 and 1978 for a study of police and crime in the United States. Raw and aggregated time-series data are presented in Parts 1 and 3 on 23 American cities for most years during the period 1860-1920. The data were drawn from annual reports of police departments found in the Library of Congress or in newspapers and legislative reports located elsewhere. Variables in Part 1, for which the city is the unit of analysis, include arrests for drunkenness, conditional offenses and homicides, persons dismissed or held, police personnel, and population. Part 3 aggregates the data by year and reports some of these variables on a per capita basis, using a linear interpolation from the last decennial census to estimate population. Part 2 contains data for 267 United States cities for the period 1880-1890 and was generated from the 1880 federal census volume, REPORT ON THE DEFECTIVE, DEPENDENT, AND DELINQUENT CLASSES, published in 1888, and from the 1890 federal census volume, SOCIAL STATISTICS OF CITIES. Information includes police personnel and expenditures, arrests, persons held overnight, trains entering town, and population.

Citation

Monkkonen, Eric. Police Departments, Arrests and Crime in the United States, 1860-1920. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2006-01-12. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07708.v2

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Funding

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics

Subject Terms

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Time Period(s)

1860 -- 1920

Date of Collection

1975 -- 1978
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Data Source

annual reports of police departments, 1888 federal census volume, REPORT ON THE DEFECTIVE, DEPENDENT, AND DELINQUENT CLASSES, and 1890 federal census volume, SOCIAL STATISTICS OF CITIES

Data Type(s)

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Original Release Date

1984-03-18

Version History

2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:
  • Monkkonen, Eric. Police Departments, Arrests and Crime in the United States, 1860-1920. ICPSR07708-v2. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2005-11-04. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07708.v2

2006-01-12 All files were removed from dataset 4 and flagged as study-level files, so that they will accompany all downloads.

2005-11-04 On 2005-03-14 new files were added to one or more datasets. These files included additional setup files as well as one or more of the following: SAS program, SAS transport, SPSS portable, and Stata system files. The metadata record was revised 2005-11-04 to reflect these additions.

1984-03-18 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

  • Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.
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Notes

  • The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.