8A Intelligence is a free tool that gives sheriffs and jail administrators clean, searchable arrest rate data for all 3,127 counties — sourced from FBI NIBRS 2024 and benchmarked against state and national norms.
The FBI publishes the underlying NIBRS data, but it's raw — tens of thousands of rows that require significant processing before they tell you anything useful. We did that processing and built a clean interface on top of it. No account required once your agency is approved. Look up your county in about 30 seconds.
State-level breakdown of felony and misdemeanor arrest volumes and ratios across all 50 states + DC. See where your state stands relative to all others and understand how bail policy, population density, and enforcement culture shape the split.
Select your state and look up any county. See its arrest rate per 1,000 residents, its percentile rank within the state, and whether it falls within the normal range — or is a statistical outlier. This is the direct answer to "where do we stand?"
A national, searchable table of all 3,127 counties with filters by state, classification, and sort by any column. Useful for researchers, policymakers, and anyone planning capacity, writing a grant, or making a case to commissioners.
Every county is individually reviewed before receiving a final classification. Raw NIBRS arrest figures are cross-referenced against state reporting equivalents, multi-year trends, and local context — correctional facility presence, military installations, university enrollment, seasonal populations, and enforcement structure. A county classified as a Known Outlier has a documented, specific explanation on file. Rate alone never determines the outcome.
Arrest rates are calculated as arrests per 1,000 residents using US Census Bureau 2023 county population estimates, making counties comparable across state lines regardless of size.
Rate and felony/misdemeanor split are consistent with state peers, with adequate data coverage and no structural anomalies requiring explanation.
Rate or felony share is outside the normal range, but the cause is documented and structural — a correctional facility processing regional transfers, a military county with UCMJ jurisdiction, or a seasonal tourism population that inflates the denominator. The data is accurate; it reflects a non-standard operational context.
NIBRS coverage is too incomplete to support a reliable estimate, or the data shows internal inconsistencies that prevent confident classification. The gap itself is often a signal worth investigating.
That's the midpoint across all 3,127 counties. But median can obscure a lot of variation — and there's plenty. The range runs from near-zero to over 160/1k in institutional counties.
The large majority of counties fall within the normal range for their state. When a county is classified as a Known Outlier, it has a documented structural cause — and that explanation is visible in the tool. If your county is flagged, there's a real reason, not a statistical artifact.
States that have moved toward cashless bail or pretrial reform tend to show lower arrest rates than states with traditional bail structures. The direction makes intuitive sense — when downstream consequences change, enforcement patterns often shift with them.
They don't scatter randomly across the map. They cluster in particular regions of the South, parts of the rural Midwest, and isolated pockets in the Mountain West — often tied to economic conditions, institutional presence, or enforcement posture.
Counties flagged as Data Quality aren't just missing information — they're telling you something. When a county stops reporting to NIBRS, or reports inconsistently, that itself can be a signal worth investigating.
TX classifies drug possession (including marijuana under 4 oz) as State Jail Felonies, inflating felony counts dramatically. This single classification difference skews national felony/misdemeanor ratios — the tool flags it explicitly.
We built this because no publicly accessible equivalent existed. It took a significant amount of work, and we're glad to share it with the agencies it's designed to serve — at no cost, with no strings attached.
Already have access? Sign in to the Intelligence Hub →