DOI: 10.3886/e102180v2-6401
title: Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data: Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) 1975-2015

description: The LEOKA data sets contain highly detailed data about the number of officers/civilians employed by an agency and how many officers were killed or assaulted. Each data set contains over 2,200 columns and has a wealth of information about the circumstances of assaults on officers. <br><br>All the data was downloaded from NACJD as ASCII+SPSS Setup files and read into R using the package asciiSetupReader. It was then cleaned in R. The "cleaning" just means that column names were standardized (different years have slightly different spellings for many columns). Standardization of column names is necessary to stack multiple years together. Categorical variables (e.g. state) were also standardized (i.e. fix spelling errors). <br><br>About 7% of all agencies in the data report more officers or civilians than population. As such, I removed the officers/civilians per 1,000 population variables. You should exercise caution if deciding to generate and use these variables yourself. <br><br>I did not make any changes to the numeric columns except for the following. A few years of data had the values "blank" or "missing" as indicators of missing values. Rows in otherwise numeric columns (e.g. jan_asslt_no_injury_knife) with these values were replaced with NA.   There were three obvious data entry errors in officers killed by felony/accident that I changed to NA. <br><br>In 1978 the agency "pittsburgh" (ORI = PAPPD00) reported 576 officers killed by accident during March.<br>In 1979 the agency "metuchen" (ORI = NJ01210) reported 991 officers killed by felony during August.<br>In 1990 the agency "penobscot state police" (ORI = ME010SP) reported 860 officers killed by accident during July.<br><br>No other changes to numeric columns were made.<br><br>Each zip file contains all years as individual monthly files of the specified data type It also includes a file with all years aggregated yearly and stacked into a single data set. Please note that each monthly file is quite large (2,200+ columns) so it may take time to download the zip file and open each data file.<br><br>For the R code used to clean this data, see here. https://github.com/jacobkap/crime_data.<br><br>The UCR Handbook (https://ucr.fbi.gov/additional-ucr-publications/ucr_handbook.pdf/view) describes the LEOKA data as follows:<br><br>"The UCR Program collects data from all contributing agencies ... on
 officer line-of-duty deaths and assaults.  Reporting agencies must 
submit data on ... their own duly sworn officers feloniously or 
accidentally killed or assaulted in the line of duty.  The purpose of 
this data collection is to identify situations in which officers are 
killed or assaulted, describe the incidents statistically, and publish 
the data to aid agencies in developing policies to improve officer safety.<br><br>"... agencies must record assaults on sworn officers.  Reporting agencies must count all assaults that resulted in serious injury or assaults in which a weapon was used that could have caused serious injury or death.  They must include other assaults not causing injury if the assault involved more than mere verbal abuse or minor resistance to an arrest.  In other words, agencies must include in this section all assaults on officers, whether or not the officers sustained injuries."<br><br>If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please contact me at jkkaplan6@gmail.com<br><br><br>
description: Law enforcement agencies in the United States.<br>Smallest Geographic Unit: Police agency jurisdiction