Open policing information exists, but it is scattered: crime statistics live in one federal system, staffing surveys in an academic archive, policy manuals on hundreds of agency portals, and research guides on their own sites. Anyone trying to understand a policing problem has to already know where all of those places are.
This hub collects those open sources into one searchable place and organizes them around problem-oriented policing, so that a crime analyst, researcher, journalist, student, or officer can go from a problem to the relevant research, comparable projects, and jurisdiction-level data without leaving the site.
Problem-oriented policing (POP) is an approach, introduced by Herman Goldstein in 1979, that shifts policing from responding to individual incidents toward identifying and addressing the recurring problems behind them. Instead of treating ten thefts as ten separate calls, POP asks what those thefts have in common — place, time, victim, opportunity — and what would actually reduce them.
POP work commonly follows the SARA model: Scanning (spotting recurring problems), Analysis (understanding causes with data), Response (implementing tailored interventions), and Assessment (measuring whether they worked). The guides, projects, and agency data on this site are organized to support each of those stages — the POP Learning Center walks through all of it. For the authoritative library of POP resources, see the ASU Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.
| Source | Contents | Update cadence |
|---|---|---|
| FBI Crime Data Explorer (CDE) | Agency directory (~19,000 US agencies), crime trends, NIBRS incident detail | Periodic snapshots via the FBI CDE API |
| BJS LEMAS (via NACJD/ICPSR) | Law enforcement staffing, budget, and policy survey waves, 1987–2020 | Updated when new survey waves are released (roughly every 3–4 years) |
| ASU Center for Problem-Oriented Policing | POP guides and conference project submissions | As published |
| National police directories | Force directories and recorded crime for the United Kingdom (data.police.uk), Canada (Statistics Canada policing tables), and 13 more seeded countries | Yearly, or as national statistics are released |
| Agency policy portals (PowerDMS and similar) | Public police policy manuals and documents, inventoried by the policing catalog | Weekly link validation and inventory refresh |
| Open data portals | City, county, and state open data catalogs with policing datasets | Weekly link validation |
The full registry of open policing data sources, with provenance and coverage notes for each entry, is browsable on the Source Registry page.
- Everything here is a snapshot, not a live feed. Each dataset page notes when its snapshot was generated.
- NIBRS participation and reporting quality vary by agency and year; an agency with no NIBRS detail may simply not report incident-based data for the covered window.
- LEMAS survey records are joined to agencies by ORI where available, otherwise by normalized agency name and state. Name-based joins can occasionally mis-match; corrections are pinned in the pipeline's override file as they are found.
- Policy inventories reflect what agencies publicly list on their portals — an absent policy is not evidence the agency lacks one.
All data on this site comes from public, open sources. Cite the original source (FBI CDE, BJS, the publishing agency, or the POP Center) in research or reporting, and verify against the original before operational use.
Machine-readable access: an index of AI-consumable markdown records is published at /llms.txt, and the generated datasets are downloadable as JSON/CSV from the Source Registry page. A documented public API is planned.
Found a data error, a broken link, or an open source we should index? Use the report form or open an issue on GitHub. Corrections are applied through a versioned corrections file, so fixes persist across data refreshes. Source suggestions are especially welcome for jurisdictions outside the United States.