City crime open data: Socrata, ArcGIS and one API
City police portals publish incident data through Socrata, CKAN or ArcGIS, each with different fields, paging and throttling. Crime Data API normalises 12 of them into one schema with radius search, 19 categories and per-city licences.
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Platform facts from dev.socrata.com/docs/app-tokens, dev.socrata.com/docs/datatypes/location and ArcGIS REST: Query (Feature Service/Layer), checked 2026-11-06. Portal list from our own ingest code. Last updated: 2026-11-07.
What the portals give you
Most city police open-data portals are free and need no vendor contract. They are not one API, though. Of the 11 cities we cover, 6 publish through Socrata (San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, Dallas, Cincinnati, Kansas City), 2 through CKAN datastore endpoints (Boston, Milwaukee) and 4 through ArcGIS feature services (Washington DC, Minneapolis, Baltimore). Each has its own field names, date format, offense text and quirks.
Platform limits to plan for
| Platform | Fact | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Socrata | Requests without an app token "come from a shared pool via IP address" and face "a much lower throttling limit"; throttled requests get 429. With a token the docs say they currently do not throttle. | dev.socrata.com/docs/app-tokens |
| Socrata | Location columns hold latitude, longitude and address; within_circle returns rows inside a circle measured in meters. | dev.socrata.com/docs/datatypes/location |
| ArcGIS | Each layer has a maxRecordCount (default server value 1000 or 2000, or set by the owner); resultOffset is used to fetch records beyond it. | ArcGIS REST: Query (Feature Service/Layer) |
| ArcGIS | where takes SQL-92 syntax on the layer's fields for most data sources. | ArcGIS REST: Query (Feature Service/Layer) |
What a normalised API saves
- One schema: city, local time, one of 19 categories, the source's own offense text, latitude, longitude.
- One query shape for all cities:
lat,lon,radius_m,category, cursor paging. - No per-portal tokens, paging rules, or date and coordinate cleanup in your code.
- Source, licence and newest record date for each city in
GET /v1/cities. - Counts by category and month from
/v1/statswithout pulling every row.
What you give up
Coverage: only the 11 cities listed. Freshness is tied to each source (we ingest nightly; NYC publishes quarterly). If you need one city only and can maintain the integration, the portal directly is free. Example request and response: crime data API page.
curl 'https://crimedata.dev/v1/incidents?lat=37.788&lon=-122.4075&radius_m=500&limit=2' -H 'x-api-key: YOUR_KEY'
Limits
Crime Data API is not affiliated with or endorsed by Tyler Technologies, Socrata, or Esri. Query, pagination, and throttling capabilities depend on the particular endpoint and layer configuration. Crime Data API is not a consumer reporting agency. Do not use it for tenant, employment, credit or insurance screening or any eligibility decision. Reported incidents are not convictions or a prediction of personal risk. Data is revised by the source and can be incomplete; keep the source attribution and check each city's licence for your use.
FAQ
How do I get crime data from a Socrata portal?
Find the city's police incident dataset and call its SODA endpoint for JSON. Register an app token, because Socrata throttles requests without one more tightly (dev.socrata.com/docs/app-tokens, checked 2026-11-06).
Do all city crime portals use Socrata?
No. Of the 11 cities Crime Data API covers, 6 use Socrata, 2 use CKAN and 4 use ArcGIS feature services, each with different fields.
How do I page through ArcGIS crime data?
Use resultOffset and resultRecordCount, capped by the layer's maxRecordCount (developers.arcgis.com query reference, checked 2026-11-06).
What does Crime Data API add over the raw portals?
One schema, 19 categories, radius search by point or address, monthly stats, and the source, licence and freshness of each city, for 11 US cities.
What does it cost?
Basic is free with 500 calls a month, Pro is $29 a month for 20,000 calls and Ultra is $79 a month for 100,000 calls, sold on RapidAPI.
What should I not use it for?
Crime Data API is not a consumer reporting agency. Do not use it for tenant, employment, credit or insurance screening or any eligibility decision. Reported incidents are not convictions or a prediction of personal risk.