Research Guides: Social Explorer: Using the Social Explorer Database: Criminal Justice

Getting Started

Criminal Justice / Criminology

This page contains a curated list of maps, datasets, and teach and learn modules useful for criminal justice courses. This list is not exhaustive, but it provides a starting point for you to explore all that Social Explorer has to offer.

As always, if you need help please visit our help center or feel free to contact us!

Teach and Learn Modules

Teach & Learn Modules for Courses

Use these resources created by Social Explorer to inspire creativity, encourage hands-on learning, and equip your students with desired skills. Here are some suggested modules to get you started. To explore the entire library of activities, click here!

Comparing Crime and Arrest Rates
This module addresses the challenges with interpreting data from the Uniform Crime Report and supplemental FBI data as the primary sources of U.S. crime data, and shows students how to visualize differences in crime rates and arrest rates.
Education and Crime
This module visualizes crime rates across varying levels of educational attainment, school drop out rates, and school enrollment.
Explaining Neighborhood Differences in Crime
This module focuses on the geographic differences in crime within the United States.
Immigration and Crime
This module investigates the relationship between crime rates and high immigrant populations.
Juvenile Crime
This module demystifies the misunderstood relationship between juvenile crime and historical increases in violent crimes that were falsely attributed to juvenile and young adults, particularly young black males, the response to which continues to affect those communities today.
Mental Health and Crime
This modules visualizes the relationship between mentally unhealthy days and crime.
Property vs. Violent Crime
This module visualizes changes in violent crime and property crime historically, in order to debunk misconceptions concerning crime that influences our thinking about how to allocate appropriate resources to address these issues.
Visualizing the Evolution of U.S. Racial/Ethnic Demography
This module explores whether the U.S. is actually a diverse melting pot, or something else.
Visualizing Trends in Arrests
This module addresses the prevalence of crime, how active law enforcement is, and who is more likely to be arrested, and more.
Visualizing Crime Rates Across Concentrated Disadvantages
This module examines the trends in crime across the U.S.

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Maps

Curated Maps for Criminal Justice / Criminology

Use Social Explorer maps to visualize and analyze the characteristics of almost any location, like voting, poverty, aging populations, ethnicity and race, spending patterns, health indicators, crime, environment or education. You can see trends and make comparisons over time and place to gain insights and make decisions.

For an introduction to how to use Social Explorer Maps, start with this video tutorial. There are videos that explain how to browse available datasets, customize your map, compare variables and notice trends, export and share your projects, and even tips for how to tell stories using your data.

When you're ready, click on one of the example maps below to get started, or access the complete set of maps here. Also, don't be afraid to explore! You can always save your variables to go back to later.

U.S. Crime Data
Visualize U.S. crime data on a metropolitan/nonmetropolitan county level for years 2010 and 2012. The crime data originates from FBI and UCR. Data are available for different types of crimes and arrests, including violent crimes and murders as well as property crimes such as burglaries and larceny-thefts.
United States
Explore over 500,000 data indicators and over 220 years of data for the United States from present to 1790, including all Decennial Censuses, American Community Surveys and many other datasets. Data indicators include violent crimes, property crimes, employment, population change, poverty, transportation, education, health, income, and other factors that intersect with criminal justice-related issues.

Datasets

Datasets

Social Explorer allows you to quickly and easily create and manage reports for one or thousands of variables and geographies. You can also download data for further processing. To get started:

This guide will show you how to create, save and share, and download a report
To access the complete list of available datasets and build your own reports, click here.
Check out the example datasets below
For more detailed information on each dataset, reference the data dictionary

FBI Crime Data
This crime data originates from the U.S. Department of Justice - Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). FBI collects the data through the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and provides the volume of violent and property crimes as report by law enforcement agencies. Annual data available from 2010 - 2018.
U.S. Crime Data (UCR)
Explore crime data at the county level in the United States. This crime data originates from UCR - The Uniform Crime Reporting Program, while population estimates data were collected by the Census Bureau. Data is tabulated and processed by Social Explorer. Annual data available from 2010 - 2014.