Kentucky Drug and Sex Crimes

Three crime data sources were collected and merged for this study. All three crime sources were either only reporting on the U.S. state of Kentucky (KOOL and Louisville Open Data), or filtered to only contain results for the U.S. state of Kentucky (FBI). Each data source contains unique features such as crime classifications, and unique challenges in collection and cleaning.

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issues a variety of query-able crime related data on their website. This data is sourced from law enforcement agencies across the U.S. as part of their National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and its standards. The goal of gathering, standardizing, and providing this information is to facilitate research into crime and law enforcement patterns. The information is provided as a collection of CSV files with instructions and code for importing into a SQL database. For the purposes of this research, we utilized the the crime databases for the years 2017, 2018 and 2019, containing a total of 1,939,990 unique incidents. The NIBRS_code property denotes the type of crime as assigned by the reporting agency. The human trafficking codes are 40A (Prostitution), 40B (Assisting or Promoting Prostitution), and 370 (Pornography/Obscene Material). The drug incidents were found using codes 35A (Drug/Narcotic Violations) and 35B (Drug Equipment Violations).

The Kentucky Department of Corrections, as a service to the public, provides an online lookup of people currently in its custody called Kentucky Offender Online Lookup (KOOL). This web application offers users tools to search for sets of inmates based on features such as name, crime date, crime name, race, and gender. The data that KOOL searches contains only people who are currently under supervision of the state of Kentucky (or should be under supervision in the case of escape).

The Louisville Open Data Initiative (LOD) is a program from the city of Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.A. to increase the transparency of the city government and promote technological innovation. As part of LOD, a dataset of crime reports is made available online. The records contained within the LOD dataset represent any call for police service where a police incident report was generated. This does not necessarily mean a crime was committed, as an incident report can be generated before an investigation has taken place.