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Police Documentation of Drunk Driving Arrests, 1984-1987: Los Angeles, Denver, and Boston

Metadata Updated: March 12, 2025

These data measure the effects of blood alcohol content coupled with officer reports at the time of arrest on driving while intoxicated (DWI) case outcomes (jury verdicts and guilty pleas). Court records and relevant police reports for drunk-driving cases drawn from the greater metropolitan areas of Boston, Denver, and Los Angeles were compiled to produce this data collection. Cases were selected to include roughly equal proportions of guilty pleas, guilty verdicts, and not-guilty verdicts. DWI cases were compared on the quality and quantity of evidence concerning the suspect's behavior, with the evidence coming from any mention of 20 standard visual detection cues prior to the stop, 13 attributes of general appearance and behavior immediately after the stop, and the results of as many as 7 field sobriety tests. Questions concerned driving-under-the-influence cues (scoring sheet), observed traffic violations and actual traffic accidents, the verdict, DWI history, whether the stop resulted from an accident, whether the attorney was public or private, and sanctions that followed the verdict. Also included were demographic questions on age, sex, and ethnicity.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: us-pd

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
Metadata Updated Date March 12, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOJ JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
Metadata Updated Date March 12, 2025
Publisher National Institute of Justice
Maintainer
Identifier 3271
Data First Published 1990-10-16T00:00:00
Language eng
Data Last Modified 2005-11-04T00:00:00
Public Access Level public
Aicategory Not AI-ready
Bureau Code 011:21
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://www.justice.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id fc40aa47-d8f3-4bde-97ed-17eedc87dfa8
Harvest Source Id 3290e90a-116f-42fc-86ac-e65521ef3b68
Harvest Source Title DOJ JSON
Internalcontactpoint {"@type": "vcard:Contact", "fn": "Jennifer Scherer", "hasEmail": "mailto:Jennifer.Scherer@usdoj.gov"}
Jcamsystem {"acronym": "OJP_EXT", "id": 8, "name": "External system not available in CSAM"}
License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Metadatamodified 9/2/2022 6:22:00 PM
Program Code 011:060
Publisher Hierarchy Office of Justice Programs > National Institute of Justice
Sourceidentifier https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR09400
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash c5b4c8793916c31d76457fe77c89f10d84add29f329c1fbf88b0f18aa1c9032e
Source Schema Version 1.1

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