About the Author

Jacob Kaplan

I am a Professional Specialist at the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) and a member of Criminal Justice @ SPIA at Princeton University. My research focuses on law enforcement, including its impact on violent crime, the influence of removing ‘bad apple’ officers on reducing complaints against officers, the extent to which police forces represent the civilian populations they serve, and the role of race and political affiliations in shaping officer behavior. In addition to this, I conduct methodological research focused on the quality and usability of crime data, with a special emphasis on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program.

I am the author of A Criminologist’s Guide to R: Crime by the Numbers (Chapman & Hall/CRC The R Series, 2023), an introductory textbook on the R programming language tailored for crime research, with a special focus on data cleaning and analysis. In addition, I have developed several R packages, including fastDummies, asciiSetupReader, and predictrace, to streamline the data analysis process for researchers. My website, Crime Data Tool, offers users an interactive platform to explore crime data from thousands of agencies across hundreds of variables (e.g., arrests, offenses, demographics)—no data or programming skills required.

My research has been published in leading academic journals, such as the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, and American Political Science Review. I hold a B.S. in Criminal Justice from California State University, Sacramento, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Criminology from the University of Pennsylvania. I previously served on the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Advisory Policy Board (APB) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Subcommittee.