Jake Lawrence · Public Data / Consumer Finance / Open Data · Field Data theme
Complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by state, product and year, 2020 to 2025, with a rate per 100,000 residents. Debt collection complaints reached 283,203 in 2025, 5.3 times the 2020 count. Counts only, no company names, in a hashed open-data release.
Data study 1 of the Fox River Press data studies. A content-as-code reading of the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database: complaints by calendar year, state and product group from 2020 to 2025, joined to the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 population estimates for a rate per 100,000 residents in the 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico. The CFPB renamed and split several products in April 2023, so ten product groups join the old and new names to keep each series continuous, and a test holds every year's groups to the CFPB's own total. The fetch step reads only state counts and the national response mix; it never stores a complaint, a narrative, a ZIP code or a company, and a leak scan holds the release to that. The signature interaction is a tile map of the states with a product picker, a year row and a per-resident or raw-count toggle, deep-linkable, opening on debt collection. The release is versioned CSV and JSON with SHA-256 hashes, CC BY 4.0, refreshed quarterly; its numbers re-derive in the browser. Descriptive by design: any reading of what the counts mean lives with the reviewed consumer guides that cite it.
Two field-data releases about public counting. Counting the Killings reconciles five counters because the state cannot publish a total; Consumer Complaints by State reads a count the federal government does publish, and is careful to say what kind of count it is: not a sample of experience, but a record of who filed.
Two releases in the same content-as-code, hashed open-data mold, built to be forked. Pingree Grove Studies makes one village's public records legible to its residents; Consumer Complaints by State makes a national public database legible state by state, per resident.
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