Developer home
NCVS API
API Terms of Service

National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) API

The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) RESTful API is a web service that provides data on violent and property victimization by select victim, household, and incident characteristics. The NCVS is the nation's primary source of information on criminal victimization. It is an annual data collection conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The NCVS collects information from a nationally representative sample of U.S. households on nonfatal crimes, reported and not reported to the police, against persons age 12 or older.

API access

Click on the "API endpoints" link below to obtain instructions on using the API and the types of calls that can be made. End-points are available in XML, JSON, and CSV formats. To see descriptions of the dataset variables, click on the "personal" and "household" links in the table below.

API endpoints

Data downloads and variable descriptions

The table below provides dataset variable descriptions and archives of the personal and household victimization datasets in CSV format. Due to the large size of the datasets, calls to the API require specification of a single year. The CSV archives shown below contain data for all of the years specified.

• 2016 data were updated in January 2019 and may differ from previous releases. See Criminal Victimization, 2016: Revised (NCJ252121) for more information.
• The complete 1993-2019 CSV data archive files, downloadable via links in the table below, may be too large to be opened using some versions of Microsoft Excel. Users encountering this limitation in their version of Excel are encouraged to open the file using a text reader or an alternative CSV compatible software package.

Methodology

Methodology for the NCVS datasets

For codebooks and further details about the NCVS collection, visit the NCVS page at the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD).