IRE & NICAR to freely publish unprocessed data by Charles Minshew.
From the post:
Inspired by our members, IRE is pleased to announce the first release of raw, unprocessed data from the NICAR Database Library.
The contents of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) master file for 2015 are now available for free download on our website. The package contains the original fixed-width files, data dictionaries for the tables as well as the FBI’s UCR user guide. We are planning subsequent releases of other raw data that is not readily available online.
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The yearly data from the FBI details arrest and offense numbers for police agencies across the United States. If you download this unprocessed data, expect to do some work to get it in a useable format. The data is fixed-width, across multiple tables, contains many records on a single row that need to be unpacked and in some cases decoded, before being cleaned and imported for use in programs like Excel or your favorite database manager. Not up to the task? We do all of this work in the version of the data that we will soon have for sale in the Database Library.
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I have peeked at the data and documentation files and “raw” is the correct term.
Think of it as great exercise for when an already cleaned and formatted data set isn’t available.
More to follow on processing this data set.