Data Sources: Social Issues

Dehydrated (tweetID's only) Twitter datasets originating from the Ferguson Black Lives Matter community, covering subsequent, mostly African American, events and movements. The Library's DREAM Lab can assist with using Twarc, Doc the Now's Twitter harvesting tool.

A longitudinal survey about families in Los Angeles county, California, and about the neighborhoods where they live.

The first wave of the L.A.FANS was fielded between 2000 and 2001. Fieldwork for Wave 2 of L.A.FANS was conducted between 2006 and 2008. PUMS and restricted-data available.

A GitHub repository that seeks “to accumulate and contextualize evidence of police brutality during the 2020 George Floyd protests.” Data is available as JSON, CSV, MD and a RESTful API. Includes links to projects created with the data, including a gallery of websites that have been created with the data.

A list of publications on criminal statistics available from the Attorney General's Office.

A branch of the Black Youth Project (http://blackyouthproject.com/) run by the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. GenForward collects social survey data among young people (Millenials/Gen Z), to understand the challenges and opportunities faced by young people of color in the contemporary United States

The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) was enacted by Congress in 1975 and was implemented by the Federal Reserve Board's Regulation C. On July 21, 2011, the rule-writing authority of Regulation C was transferred to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Regulation C, requires lending institutions to report public loan data. In this section of the website, you can find out more about the regulation and its interpretation.

1883-1941 from the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research

Freedom on the Move is a database of newspaper ads of "fugitives" or runaway-slaves. from the South. The ads preserved the details of individuals, their appearance, and personalities, serving as a rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved peoples.

Documents various types of surveillance technology used by 3,500 law enforcement agencies around the US. The 5,300 data-points, crowdsourced with the help of hundreds of students and volunteers, cover a dozen categories of technology, such as automated license plate readers, facial recognition systems, and partnerships with doorbell camera–companies. A project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

ProPublica has published a dataset of more than 12,000 civilian complaints against nearly 4,000 NYPD officers. The data were obtained through a freedom-of-information request to New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, after NY state overturned a decades-old statute that had shielded the records. ProPublica’s database “lists the name of each officer, the race of the complainant and the officer, a category describing the alleged misconduct, and whether the CCRB concluded the officers’ conduct violated NYPD rules.”

Crime statistics and publications from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

A database of all deaths through fatal police interactions in the United States from Jan. 1, 2000

Thematic collection from ICPSR, the mission of the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) is to facilitate research in criminal justice and criminology, through the preservation, enhancement, and sharing of computerized data resources; through the production of original research based on archived data; and through specialized training workshops in quantitative analysis of crime and justice data.

Created by Greg Doucette and curated by Jason E. Miller, this site along with its underlying data (https://tinyurl.com/GFProtestPoliceBrutality) compiles more than 1,800 incidents of “unnecessary violence by law enforcement officers against civilians”

A database of vehicle and pedestrian stops from law enforcement departments across the United States.

Since 1930, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has compiled the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) to serve as periodic nationwide assessments of reported crimes not available elsewhere in the criminal justice system. With the 1977 data, the title was expanded to Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data. Each year, participating law enforcement agencies contribute reports to the FBI either directly or through their state reporting programs. ICPSR archives the UCR data as five separate components: (1) summary data, (2) county-level data, (3) incident-level data (National Incident-Based Reporting System [NIBRS]), (4) hate crime data, and (5) various, mostly nonrecurring, data collections.

Created by 8cantwait.org, a police reform organization, this project compiled the use of force policies of 100 large police departments, and evaluated them based on the 8 specific reforms for which the organization have advocated.

Contains every fatal police shooting in the United States since Jan 1. 2015.

A project created by an individual to document and map BLM protests across the United States--more than 4400 as of September 14. The background data files are also available (https://www.creosotemaps.com/blm2020/json/).

The COVID Racial Data Tracker advocates for, collects, publishes, and analyzes racial data on the pandemic across the United States. It’s a collaboration between the COVID Tracking Project and Boston University Antiracist Research & Policy Center (ARPC).

Digitized Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) red lining maps from the University of Richmond.

A research collaborative collecting comprehensive data on police killings nationwide to quantify the impact of police violence in communities.

Visualizing hidden histories of race and privilege in the urban landscape in Minneapolis and beyond.

An initial release of social mobility data, collaborated between Harvard Univeristy, Brown University, and The U.S. Census Bureau.