Data Sources: Police Data

Police data are data gathered and recorded by uniformed officers, detectives, and police staff in the course of their police duties and stored within police information systems. The main types of police data that are recorded are calls for service, incident data, and criminal intelligence. The main types of police data that are regularly reported publicly are crime statistics. While police data provide the most systematic coverage of reported crime available, they are susceptible to errors in recording, inconsistencies in format, and incomplete entries. Police data also are limited; typically they include only crime reported to the police or detected by them through the use of law-enforcement intelligence. For scholars of transnational crime, police data provide a valuable source of information but may be limited ...