Calling the Police - Citizen Reporting of Serious Crime, 1979

• NCJ Number: 97603
• Author(s): W Spelman; D K Brown
• Date Published: 1985
• Length: 57 pages
• Sale Source: National Institute of Justice/; Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This manual presents the study variables and coding information for the data set describing citizen calls to the police and police dispatching time in four locations: Jacksonville, Fla.; Peoria, Ill.; Rochester, N.Y.; and San Diego.

Abstract

The data cover 3,300 reported crime incidents between April 21 and December 7, 1979. The crimes included aggravated assault, motor vehicle theft, burglary, larceny-theft, forcible rape, and robbery. The data came from police dispatch records and interviews of citizens asking for police assistance. Variables from dispatch records include dispatch times, call priority, police travel time, caller characteristics, response code, number of suspects, and geographic source of the call. Variables from the citizen interviews include the respondent's role in the incident, the incident location, the caller's relationship to the victim, number of victims, suspect identification, police interaction, and others. The data set contains about 250 variables. Each file has a logical record length of 80 characters.