Reported dog bites in New York City — nyc

Dog bite incidents reported to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) between January 1st 2015 and December 31st 2025.

Usage

nyc_bites

Format

`nyc_bites`

A tibble with 39,082 rows and 12 columns:

unique_id: Dog bite case identifier. Unique within year, but not across the whole table. See Details.
date_of_bite: Date of bite.
year: Year of bite.
species: Species of animal (all "Dog").
breed: Breed of dog, as reported. Whitespace and capitalization are standardized. NA where no breed was recorded.
breed_rc: Recoded breed, coded in the same way as breed_rc in nyc_license. See Details.
age: Age of dog at time of bite, as reported. Character. Mostly years. Numbers with "M" indicate months, but many other formats appear.
gender: Sex of dog: "M" (male), "F" (female), or "U" (unknown).
spay_neuter: TRUE if the dog was reported to DOHMH as spayed or neutered. FALSE if it was not, or if this is unknown.
borough: Borough where the bite occurred. "Other" indicates that the bite took place outside New York City.
zip_code: Zip code where the bite occurred. Character. NA where not available. Same as zip.
zip: Zip code where the bite occurred.

Source

NYC Open Data https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/DOHMH-Dog-Bite-Data/rsgh-akpg, retrieved October 6th 2026.

Details

Section 11.03 of the NYC Health Code requires all animal bites to be reported within 24 hours of the event. Data is collected from reports received online, by mail, by fax, or by phone to 311 or the DOHMH Animal Bite Unit. Each record represents a single dog bite incident. Information on breed, age, gender, and spayed or neutered status has not been verified by DOHMH and is listed only as reported.

unique_id is not unique across the table. The source data combines several releases, and the identifier starts again from 1 in each of them: once for 2015–2017, once for 2018–2021, and once for each year from 2022. The combination of year and unique_id is unique.

breed_rc is made with the same lookup table and rules as breed_rc in nyc_license, so that breeds can be compared across the two tables. Reports that only describe a mixed-breed dog (e.g. "Mixed/Other", "Large Mixed Breed") are coded "Mixed Breed", and reports with no usable breed (e.g. "Uncertain", "Small Dog") are coded "Unknown". Free-text descriptions of two or more breeds are left as they are, so breed_rc has a long tail of rare values that do not appear in nyc_license.

Other than this the data is deliberately lightly cleaned. Values of age and zip_code are kept as reported, including malformed ones.

Author

Kieran Healy