How do we match crime data to the justice expenditure data for local units of government?
Fortunately, BJS and the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research have developed the Law Enforcement Agency Identifiers Crosswalk. The crosswalk file was designed to provide geographic and other identification information for each record included in either the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) files or BJS’s Directory of Law Enforcement Agencies. The main variables for each record are the UCR originating agency identifier number, agency name, mailing address, Census Bureau’s government identification number, UCR state and county codes, and Federal Information Processing Standards state, county, and place codes. These variables make it possible for researchers to match data based on either UCR identification information or Census Bureau identification information. JRSA checks the database to ensure that any localities that are not matched are checked by hand, and the crosswalk is updated annually. The original Crosswalk can be found at th
