Methodology
Where the data comes from
Booking sheets are pulled from public sources operated by Richmond County, GA; Columbia County, GA; McDuffie County, GA; Burke County, GA; Washington County, GA; Aiken County, SC; and Edgefield County, SC. The data on this site is the same data those agencies publish — restructured for searchability.
How records are parsed
Each booking sheet is processed by a deterministic parser specific to its layout. Five layouts have been seen across the dataset since 2013. The parsers extract name, demographics, booking number, arrest date, agency, and charge list into a normalized structure. The raw source text is retained in every case so that every claim on a record can be traced back to its source.
How charges are categorized
Charge wording varies across counties and over time. To make the data browseable, every charge is mapped to one of fifteen canonical categories by an ordered keyword/regex ruleset. The original charge text is always shown alongside the category — the category is for discovery, not a legal claim.
About the numbers
Counts, charts, and demographic ratios on this site are aggregates over the records we have been able to collect from public sources. They are not officialsheriff’s office totals. Coverage gaps — missed publish windows, parser-skipped layouts, deleted source pages — mean every dimension (per-month, per-county, per-charge, per-agency) undercounts the true booking volume. Treat the figures as a view of what has been published and indexed here, not as authoritative crime statistics.
What “in custody” means
Some records carry a custody badge sourced from a live diff against the Richmond, Columbia, Aiken, McDuffie, Burke, and Washington sheriff’s office detention-center rosters. “In custody” means the most recent successful roster fetch listed this person as a current inmate — it is not a real-time confirmation, it is the result of the last check. “Released” shows the date our roster watcher last saw the person on the roster, after which they had dropped off. Records without a badge come from sources without a public live roster (e.g. Edgefield) and carry no custody signal either way.
What we do not do
- We do not allege guilt. An arrest is not a conviction.
- We do not use a generative model to fabricate or fill in information.
- We do not charge a fee to remove or correct a record.
- We do not sell, rent, or share the database with third parties.