Editorial & Corrections Policy

How Our Content Is Produced

PlainCrime is produced by a documented, automated data pipeline that is built, maintained, and overseen by our editorial team. Official crime data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program is ingested, normalized, and turned into per-jurisdiction profiles using a published methodology. Every rate, grade, and comparison you see is computed directly from the source tables and checked against them before it is published.

We want to be precise about what this means. Our editorial team designs and maintains the methodology, the safety-grading rubric, the page templates, and the data-quality checks, and it reviews the pipeline's output and handles corrections. Individual city, county, and state pages are generated from the validated dataset rather than written by hand — that is how we can cover nearly 9,000 cities consistently. We do not estimate crime for non-reporting agencies, adjust figures for underreporting, or editorialize the underlying numbers. When a number looks wrong, we trace it back to the FBI source and fix it at the data layer, not by rewriting the page around it.

Sourcing Standards

All crime statistics on PlainCrime come from official, primary federal sources. We do not republish third-party crime indexes, scraped listings, or proprietary "safety scores" of unknown origin. Our named sources are:

• FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) — Table 8 (by city) and Table 10 (by county), via the FBI Crime Data Explorer.
• FBI Crime Data Explorer (CDE) API — state-level multi-year trends.
• U.S. Census Bureau — population context where FBI-reported populations require it.
• Bureau of Justice Statistics — victimization context for our guides.

In our guides and research articles, every load-bearing factual claim links to its primary source. Where a figure is derived (a per-capita rate, a safety grade, a national percentile), the methodology page documents exactly how it is calculated.

Update Cadence

The FBI publishes annual UCR data roughly 9 to 12 months after the reporting year ends. We refresh PlainCrime's database when a new annual release lands and update the data-vintage labels shown on each page and on the methodology page. Between releases the data is static and reflects the most recent published year. Crime statistics always describe the past, not current conditions.

Corrections

We take accuracy seriously and welcome corrections. If you believe a figure on PlainCrime is wrong, here is what happens when you report it:

1. Report — email the page and the value you are questioning to hello@plaincrime.com.
2. Verify — we check the figure against the published FBI UCR source of record for that jurisdiction and year.
3. Fix at the source — if our processing introduced the error, we correct it in the dataset and the fix propagates to every affected page on the next build. If the figure faithfully reflects the FBI source, we explain that and, where useful, add context.
4. Note — material corrections are reflected in the data-vintage and "last updated" labels.

Editorial Independence

We do not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from law enforcement agencies, cities, states, real-estate interests, or any covered entity. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense. Advertisers do not influence which jurisdictions we cover, the grades we compute, or how we present the data, and they receive no preferential placement.

Appropriate Use of This Data