UK Police Data API

Use in your agent

Load UK street-level crime into pandas and Parquet. Checked against the provider's documentation on Nov 1, 2026.

Access

• No account or key. The API returns JSON over public GET and POST endpoints.
• The API limit is 15 requests per second on average with a burst of 30.

Request

curl 'https://data.police.uk/api/crimes-street/all-crime?lat=52.629729&lng=-1.131592&date=2026-08'

Format

JSON array of crimes with category, persistent and API IDs, month, location type, approximate coordinates and street, context and latest outcome status.

Load into pandas and Parquet

Needs Python 3 with requests, pandas and pyarrow.

"""UK Police street-level crimes near central Leicester -> pandas -> Parquet. No key."""
import requests
import pandas as pd

URL = "https://data.police.uk/api/crimes-street/all-crime"
PARAMS = {"lat": 52.629729, "lng": -1.131592, "date": "2026-08"}
r = requests.get(URL, params=PARAMS, timeout=60)
r.raise_for_status()
df = pd.json_normalize(r.json(), sep="_")
df["month"] = pd.to_datetime(df["month"], format="%Y-%m")
df.to_parquet("uk_police_leicester_2026_08.parquet", index=False)
print(len(df), "crimes", df["category"].nunique(), "categories",
      df["month"].min().strftime("%Y-%m"))

Run by us on 2026-11-01 (python 3.13.5 | pandas 3.1.0 | pyarrow 26.0.0 | requests 2.34.2). Result: 1772 crimes 14 categories 2026-08

Limits

• Rate limit: 15 requests per second on average with a burst of 30.
• Point street-crime requests cover a one-mile radius.
• A custom polygon containing more than 10,000 crimes returns HTTP 503.

Quirks

• Street and coordinate values are approximate and are not exact incident locations.
• month has month precision; the day used by the last-updated endpoint is irrelevant.
• The id field belongs to the API and is not a police identifier; persistent_id is the stable crime identifier when populated.
• Coverage varies by force and month, so check the availability endpoint and changelog before comparing regions.

Terms and attribution

• The crime data is offered under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Reuse requires source acknowledgement; the licence excludes items such as personal data and third-party rights.

Sources

• https://data.police.uk/docs/authentication/: “The Police API no longer requires authentication.”
• https://data.police.uk/docs/api-call-limits/: “15 requests per second with a burst of 30”
• https://data.police.uk/docs/method/crime-last-updated/: “Crime data in the API is updated once a month.”
• https://data.police.uk/docs/method/crime-street/: “If a custom area contains more than 10,000 crimes, the API will return a 503 status code.”