Data | Jared Knowleshttps://jaredknowles.com/data/2026-06-11T18:58:22ZData analysis, photography, and the occasional thought.Jared E. Knowlesjared@fastmail.usCRDC School Arrest Rates — Bayesian Estimateshttps://jaredknowles.com/data/crdc-school-arrest-rates/2026-06-02T00:00:00Z2026-06-02T00:00:00ZModel-based estimates of school-based arrest rates for U.S. school districts and states, by race and sex, derived from the Civil Rights Data Collection.School-based arrests are one of the sharpest edges of school discipline data, and they are also some of the sparsest. Most district-by-race-by-sex cells in the Civil Rights Data Collection contain very small counts, where a raw rate of “2 arrests out of 41 students” is too noisy to compare against a district ten times its size. This dataset addresses that by replacing raw rates with Bayesian hierarchical estimates that partially pool across districts: small or noisy cells are pulled toward the broader pattern, and every estimate carries an explicit credible interval instead of a false-precision point.

The release covers eight demographic cells — race ∈ {AM, BL, HI, WH} crossed with sex ∈ {F, M} — across three CRDC collection years (2015–16, 2017–18, and 2021–22), for U.S. school districts (LEAs) and states.

What’s in the release #

Two artifacts are published on Hugging Face under release civilytics-crdc-arrests-2025.1:

  • summary.duckdb (~260 MB) — a compact DuckDB with the tables that power the live API: arrest_summary (LEA grain, ~2.27M rows), state_summary, district_dim (names + geography), and a meta table. This is the file to grab if you want point estimates and intervals.
  • parquet/ — the full raw posterior draws (500 per group), Hive-partitioned by model_id / YEAR / LEA_STATE across ~1,387 shards. Reach for this if you need to propagate uncertainty through your own downstream computation.

Quick start #

You can query a single slice straight from Hugging Face with DuckDB — no full download required:

INSTALL httpfs; LOAD httpfs;

-- Raw draws for TX, Black males, default model, 2021-22:
SELECT *
FROM read_parquet(
  'hf://datasets/civilytics/crdc-school-arrest-rates/parquet/model_id=nat_m2_mod/YEAR=21-22/LEA_STATE=TX/*.parquet'
)
WHERE RACE = 'BL' AND SEX = 'M'
LIMIT 20;

A live API serves the summary estimates at crdc-api.civilytics.org (OpenAPI/Swagger at /api/v1/__docs__/), and the full methodology and data dictionary are documented at pages.civilytics.org/crdc-arrests .

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