What public datasets provide state‑by‑state, year‑over‑year counts of arrests or charges specifically for CSAM?
Executive summary
No single public dataset identified in the provided reporting delivers ready‑made, state‑by‑state, year‑over‑year counts explicitly labelled “CSAM arrests/charges”; instead, researchers must rely on federal arrest systems (FBI UCR/NIBRS via BJS/ICPSR/NACJD and state open‑data portals) and then filter or reclassify sex‑offense categories to approximate CSAM counts, a process constrained by coding differences and reporting gaps [1] [2] [3].
1. Federal arrest collections that are the logical starting point
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program and its incident‑level successor, NIBRS, form the backbone of national arrest data and are surfaced publicly through BJS and DOJ catalog entries; these sources provide offense‑level arrest counts that researchers can aggregate to states and years, though they are not published as a pre‑filtered “CSAM” series [1] [4] [5].
2. BJS and ICPSR releases: detailed but not CSAM‑tagged
The Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes expanded arrest tables derived from FBI UCR data and curates raw data releases (including files hosted through ICPSR and NACJD) that offer agency‑level, monthly and offense‑specific arrest records necessary to compute state totals and trends, but the datasets require researchers to map offense codes to CSAM‑relevant categories because no official variable is labelled “CSAM” [5] [2] [3].
3. NACJD and university archives for historic and microdata
The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data preserves and distributes computerized crime datasets and ICPSR versions of UCR/NIBRS that carry unit‑level details useful for reconstructing state‑by‑state, year‑over‑year arrest counts by offense; again, these collections must be filtered by researchers to isolate child sexual exploitation or child pornography incidents because the archive does not provide a ready CSAM summary table in the sources reviewed [3].
4. Data.gov and DOJ catalog entries: curated federal datasets and metadata
Data.gov and related DOJ catalog pages index many DOJ/BJS datasets (including arrest data exports and federal arrest bookings) and provide APIs or downloadable files for Part I/Part II offense counts from agencies that report to UCR/NIBRS; these entries confirm available county‑ and state‑level arrest counts but do not advertise a dedicated CSAM arrest timeseries in the materials shown [6] [4] [7].
5. Non‑federal aggregators and state dashboards that may help
Policy organizations and state portals—examples include the Vera Institute’s Arrest Trends aggregation and state dashboards such as California’s OpenJustice—have experience summing agency‑level UCR/NIBRS to state totals and sometimes publish offense breakdowns; these intermediaries can reduce the work of compiling state/year tables, but the provided reporting shows they still depend on the underlying FBI/BJS feeds and do not inherently solve the CSAM‑labeling problem [2] [8] [9].
6. Why CSAM is not clearly separable in public feeds (limits and caveats)
The provided sources make clear that arrest datasets are scattered across agency reports, vary in coverage and coding, and often omit specialized labels; Arrest Trends warns of missing agencies and coding inconsistencies when aggregating UCR/CIUS data, which is precisely the obstacle to extracting a clean CSAM time series without additional case‑level coding or prosecutor datasets [2] [1].
7. Practical recommendation based on available sources
To produce state‑by‑state, year‑over‑year CSAM arrest/charge counts using only public data described here, the viable route is to download NIBRS/UCR microdata from BJS/ICPSR/NACJD or the DOJ data catalog, identify the specific offense and property codes commonly used for child pornography/sexual exploitation in those systems, and aggregate to state/year — recognizing that FBI program changes, incomplete agency reporting, and inconsistent offense labeling will require documented assumptions and may leave gaps [5] [3] [2].
8. Where to look next for more direct CSAM tallies
The FBI’s Violent Crimes Against Children initiative documents priorities and case types (including CSAM production and distribution) and is a policy reference but does not, in the pieces cited, publish a clean state/year arrest series for CSAM; therefore researchers should treat VCAC materials as subject‑matter guidance while relying on UCR/NIBRS raw data to produce numerical counts [10].