Primary Source: FBI Uniform Crime Report
All CrimeLayer safety scores are derived from the FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR) program, a voluntary federal dataset collecting city-level and agency-level crime statistics from law enforcement agencies across the United States.
- Program: FBI UCR / NIBRS
- Publisher: Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice
- Cadence: Annual (published each September for the previous calendar year)
- License: Public domain (US Government works)
- Official site: cde.ucr.cjis.gov
Redistribution Format
For ingest efficiency, CrimeLayer uses the DW Data US-crime-rates-2024 repository, which publishes FBI UCR files as semicolon-delimited CSVs in a consistent schema. This is the same underlying FBI data, just in a more convenient format.
Data Years Covered
| Data Year | Coverage | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 49 states | Primary year for all cities in the dataset |
| 2022 | 49 states | Fallback for cities missing 2023 data |
| 2021 and earlier | — | Not currently loaded (future work) |
Missing Coverage
Florida is not present in the current dataset. Florida law enforcement does not participate fully in the FBI NIBRS program, so Florida agencies do not appear in UCR reports. A Florida-specific source (Florida Department of Law Enforcement) is planned for a future release.
Other individual cities may also be missing if their local law enforcement agency did not report to UCR for that year. See the Coverage page for a state-by-state city count.
Historical Enrichment (California)
For California specifically, CrimeLayer historically supplemented FBI UCR data with the California Department of Justice Open Justice portal to populate county information. This was added during the original California-only build and remains in the database for CA cities. California is currently the only state with populated county fields.
- Source: California DOJ OpenJustice
- License: Open data
Attribution Requirement
Per the Terms of Service, wherever you display CrimeLayer data to end users, you must include visible attribution. Acceptable examples:
Safety data from the FBI Uniform Crime Report, processed by CrimeLayer.
Powered by CrimeLayer — FBI UCR data, processed into location-scoped safety scores.
What We Do NOT Source From
To be explicit about what's NOT in the CrimeLayer dataset:
- Real-time 911 call data (we are not a real-time crime tracker)
- Incident-level data (we only have aggregate annual statistics)
- Sex offender registries
- Private data brokers or people-finder sources
- Social media monitoring
- Commercial surveillance datasets
Source Updates
When CrimeLayer adds a new data source or changes an existing one, it will be logged in the Changelog.