The National Incident Crime Study (NICS) is a major data collection effort that obtained crime incident data for a large number of cities across the United States. This project was funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), and the data obtained cover the years 2000 to 2019. Most cities provide crime data for only a small subset of those years. Nonetheless, the NICS is an unprecedented data project as it provides crime incident data at various time points for a large number of cities (n = 630) that range considerably in size and geographic location. Although the sampling frame was not random, the data are relatively representative of cities across the U.S., as our analysis below reveals. We cleaned and geocoded the data, and only include crime data that reasonably matches the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data that is reported by the city to the FBI.
The National Incident Crime Study (NICS) provides data on crime incidents and the spatial location of those incidents for a large number of cities across the U.S. The spatial information of the data allows researchers to explore questions of ecological interest simultaneously across a range of cities. These data help the field move beyond single-city studies, the norm in the field, enabling researchers to ask whether and how the broader context impacts the spatial location of crime.
The NICS is a large-scale project conducted by members of the Irvine Laboratory for the Study of Space and Crime (ILSSC). The crime data for a small number of cities were collected directly from the agencies. Much of the data was obtained from public use websites of the agencies themselves. Crime data were also collected for cities from general websites, such as open data websites, and the website provided by ESRI (https://opendata.arcgis.com/datasets). Finally, crime data for another set of cities were collected from an earlier ILSSC study, the Southern California Crime Study (SCCS), also funded by the National Institute of Justice. These are data from police agencies in the five county Southern California region covering a high percentage of neighborhoods in the region: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and San Diego.
A technical document describing the dataset in more detail, as well as validity checks, is available here.