Understanding booking statistics

What the totals count

The statistics dashboard summarizes booking records captured and saved by this website. A booking count uses distinct saved booking identifiers. It is not a count of proven crimes, unique people, or all arrests in York County. Someone can have more than one booking, and a detention entry can involve several listed matters.

Dates on the dashboard use the listed booking date in Eastern time. That is different from when a record was first captured or last checked. A later discovery of an older booking can therefore affect an earlier month. The archive can contain historical booking dates without establishing that collection was complete throughout that historical period.

Bookings vs. charge rows

Imagine three fictional bookings: one has two drug-related rows, one has a drug-related row and a traffic row, and one has no captured charge information. With all agencies and categories selected, there are three bookings and four usable listed rows. Selecting the drug category gives two matching bookings and three rows. It does not give three people.

A booking can appear in more than one category. Adding category booking totals can therefore exceed the overall booking count. A description that mentions multiple counts remains a saved description row; the dashboard does not automatically expand it into that many separate rows. Read the row count as a measure of stored descriptions, not a count of incidents or victims.

Filters & missing data

Agency and category filters operate on the charge rows saved for each booking. A booking with no captured rows still contributes to the unfiltered booking total, but it cannot match a particular charge category or listed agency. The agency is the agency shown on the row; it is not a verified location of an incident or the home community of a person.

• Check the selected dates, agency, category, and snapshot time before comparing totals.
• Read missing-charge and retained-information notices; an empty charge list does not establish that no charge exists.
• Treat Uncategorized as an unmapped description group, distinct from bookings with no usable charge rows.
• Keep the current-listing count separate from the archive total. An absent current entry is not a confirmed release reason.

Comparing time periods

Trend comparisons use periods ending on a completed day, avoiding a comparison between part of today and a full earlier day. Equal-length periods are easier to compare, but they do not remove collection gaps or later corrections. A zero inside the selected range means no matching saved entries were counted; it does not prove that nothing happened in the county.

Describe a change as an increase or decrease in captured bookings for the stated period. To claim a county crime rate, you would need an appropriate incident dataset, definitions, population measure, and coverage assessment. For an official detention benchmark, the Sheriff's annual reports publish their own booking and facility measures. Those reports cover their specified periods and should be read using their own definitions rather than presented as interchangeable with this archive.