A How-To Guide to the United Kingdom's Police Data API


The Data Set

Street Level Availability

I'd like to cover three specific service requests that provide general information of the data set itself. The first request is the Street Level Availability request. This request can be created in PHP using the following code which stores the result in the $request variable.

$request = 'https://data.police.uk/api/crimes-street-dates';

We then take the result and use the file_get_contents() function within PHP which reads the entire response into a string which we will store in the variable $response.

$response = file_get_contents($request);

Since the API returns information in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format, (you can view an example of the raw JSON formatted data here) we need to then format the string to convert it into a PHP array we can manipulate. For that task, we will use the json_decode() function.

$JSONarray = json_decode($response, true);

We can then print out a list for which months police data are available using the foreach() construct.

foreach ($JSONarray as $key => $value) {
echo $value["date"] . "<"br">";
}

This service request to the API demonstrates that it contains data from January 2011 to March 2015.

Crime Categories

The second service request that I would like to cover is the Crime Categories request. This request returns a list of valid categories for a given data set date. This request can be created using the following PHP code:

$request = 'https://data.police.uk/api/crime-categories?date=2011-08';

Processing this request in a similar manner as stated above will create a list of the different categories of crimes reported in a given month. As you can see in the request URL, by appending ?date=2011-08 (which is a month/year combination in the form of YYYY-MM) to the query string we can return a list of the crime categories reported in August of 2011. As you can see from the generated list, not all the crime categories are listed. In order to do that, just remove the "date" portion of the query string from the service request.

$request = 'https://data.police.uk/api/crime-categories';

The response from this request can then be used to generate a full list of available crime categories. In all honesty, I expected far more granular data about the crime categories. The Home Office decided that "bicycle theft" was deserving of its own category but yet far more serious crimes like murder/rape/assault are grouped together under the catch-all category "Violence and sexual offences." I find that to be an odd choice because I think there is more public interest in seeing very narrow and specific information of the most serious offenses.

Last Updated

The final service request that I would like to cover that provides general information about the data set is the Last Updated request. This request merely returns the date of the last update to the API and can be created using the following code:

$request = 'https://data.police.uk/api/crime-last-updated';

After the JSON encoded string response has been decoded, the date can be printed using the following:

$first_value = reset($JSONarray);
echo $first_value;

These three service requests provide general information concerning the API. Let's take a look at more specific service requests dealing with police force related data.