Formation Process of the Criminological Record

Criminology seeks to understand how crime patterns emerge out of a dynamic behavioral system. It pursues this goal with data that is a static derivative of that system. This paper examines the processes that underlie the formation of this static criminological record. Daily snapshots of the open crime data posted by the Chicago Police Department were collected over nearly a full year, yielding a sample of approximately 45.5 million observations covering 230,410 unique crimes. The analyses suggest that the open criminological record is unstable for weeks after crime events first appear but also that the temporal dynamics governing the addition, loss, and alteration of records are all statistically regular. Apart from homicide, events in the open criminological record transitions to being largely static within a year.