policedatR: a comprehensive R package for stop and search data in England and Wales

Research on Stop and Search in England and Wales is constrained by substantial barriers to data access, inconsistent geographic coverage, and technical complexity. This paper presents policedatR, an R package that addresses these challenges by providing streamlined access to comprehensive stop and search data from the data.police.uk Application Programming Interface (API). policedatR automates data acquisition across multiple geographic scales, enriches datasets with population estimates and geographic identifiers, and includes functions for analysing the data, including calculating ethnic disproportionality. We describe the architecture and main functionalities of policedatR and demonstrate its capabilities and utility with analyses of temporal trends, geographic variation and ethnic disparities at national (e.g. countrywide, Police Force Area) and local (e.g. sub-local authority) levels. We also provide an example of how data acquired using the package can be harmonised with other datasets (in this case the English Indices of Deprivation) to explore broader questions on stop and search and society. By transforming thousands of individual API calls into a straightforward analytical workflow, policedatR facilitates rigorous empirical research and supports democratic accountability in policing.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40163-025-00266-6.