Issues with using police data to investigate offending: A research perspective

Police data is an important source of information for researchers about investigations, suspects, and victims. However, crime records can be problematic to work with. Here we outline three key issues along with our approach. We discuss data quality, which reflects missing and misclassified values; inconsistency, which refers to the vague and at times different definitions provided; and granularity, which reflects the lack of detailed information included in the datasets. We recommend developing a robust strategy for working with missing data, triangulating across different sources, creating higher-order categories where necessary, and creating a detailed data governance plan before analysis begins.