|
Specifically excluded from this category are
motorboats, construction
equipment, airplanes and farming equipment.
APPENDIX II
Explanation of County-level Data
The number of arrests and offenses for each
crime in every U.S. county from 1977-1996 was
obtained from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report
County-level Data.
When the UCR data had an observation with a FIPS
code that did not match any county listed
in the codebooks, that observation was deleted.
One significant problem with the offense data
has occurred since 1985. When ICPSR compiles
the FBI data, it cannot distinguish between
legitimate values of 0 and values of 0 that
should
have been coded missing.48 If an individual
offense or arrest category had a value of 0 and
that
county had non-zero values for other crime
categories, we used the raw data. This rule was
followed because the FBI and ICPSR indicated
that law enforcement agencies normally report
the data for all crimes and do not selectively
send data for some types of crimes and not for
others. If the number of offenses and arrests
was 0 for all categories in a given county in a
given
year, then that county was assigned missing
values for all offense and arrest rates.
State populations were taken from the
Statistical Abstract of the United States. The
county
population, age, sex and race data for all years
except 1990 and 1992 were obtained from the
U.S. Department of Commerce, a division of the
Bureau of the Census. All population measures
estimate the July 1 population for the
respective years.49 The age distributions of
large military
installations, colleges, and institutions were
estimated by a separate procedure.
Back to casino
news
|
