Austin Crime Data Scraper

Austin Crime Data Scraper

Scrape Austin crime incident reports from the city's open data portal, up to a million per run. Every record includes the offense type, date, location, council district, and family violence flag. No API key or login. Export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML.

Austin's official crime dataset is public but hard to query at scale. This Actor reads the Austin Open Data Portal directly and returns each incident as a flat row, filtered by date, crime type, council district, or family violence flag. No Socrata token or setup needed.

Who uses it	What they scrape Austin Open Data Portal for
Local journalists	Track crime trends in specific Austin neighborhoods for reporting.
Urban planners	Analyze incident patterns by council district to inform safety initiatives.
Real estate analysts	Assess crime rates around properties to guide investment decisions.
Community advocates	Monitor family violence incidents to support outreach programs.
Academic researchers	Study temporal and spatial crime patterns for public policy papers.

What it does

This Actor collects Austin Police Department crime incident reports from the city's open data portal and returns each one as a flat row.

• 📅 Date range filter: set start and end dates to pull incidents from any period.
• 🔍 Crime type search: match offense types like THEFT, BURGLARY, or ASSAULT with a simple substring.
• 🗺️ Council district filter: narrow results to a specific Austin district, 1 through 10.
• ⚠️ Family violence flag: return only incidents marked as family violence.
• 📊 Scalable collection: fetch up to 1,000,000 records per run, from a handful to the full dataset.

Results export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML, or straight from the API.

What you can do with Austin Open Data Portal data

📈 Track crime trends over time.

A local newsroom runs the Actor weekly with a date range to chart theft and assault counts by district and inform public safety stories.

🏘️ Assess neighborhood safety.

A real estate analyst filters incidents by council district and crime type to compare areas before recommending properties to clients.

⚠️ Monitor family violence reports.

A community nonprofit sets the family violence flag to true and collects recent incidents to target outreach and support services.

🗺️ Map incident hotspots.

An urban planner pulls all incidents for a year and uses the location fields to create heat maps for a city council presentation.

Why choose this scraper

	What you get
No API key	Reads the public Austin Open Data Portal directly, no registration or token.
Flat output	Each incident is one row with consistent fields, ready for spreadsheets or databases.
Flexible filters	Combine date, crime type, district, and family violence to target exactly what you need.
High volume	Collect up to a million records per run for large-scale analysis.

How it compares

No other Store actor targets Austin Open Data Portal the same way, so the honest comparison is with the alternatives teams actually weigh.

	Austin Crime Data Scraper	Build it in-house	By hand
Setup	Run it now, zero config	Days of engineering	None, but hours per pull
When Austin Open Data Portal changes	Maintained for you	You fix it	You re-learn the page
Proxies, retries, anti-bot	Built in	Your problem	Browser only
Output	Fixed JSON schema, CSV/Excel export	Whatever you build	Copy-paste
Cost	Pay per result	Engineering time	Analyst hours

Configure the run

Drive the Actor with optional filters for date range, crime type, council district, and family violence flag, and set a maximum number of incidents to collect. The Input tab lists every parameter.

A first run with the defaults:

{
  "maxItems": 10
}

A larger pull:

{
  "maxItems": 200
}

Pricing

Pay-per-result: $0.021 per result collected. You pay only for the results written to your dataset.

Results collected	Approximate cost
100 results	$2.10
1,000 results	$21.00
10,000 results	$210.00

New Apify accounts start with $5 in free credit.

Free users

Free-plan runs return up to 10 results as a preview. Upgrade your Apify plan to collect up to 1,000,000 results per run.

Run it

1. Create a free Apify account with $5 in credit.
2. Open the Austin Crime Data Scraper.
3. Set your inputs and any filters, then click Start.
4. Export the results as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the Dataset tab.

Run it programmatically through the Apify API (run-sync-get-dataset-items) or the ApifyClient for JavaScript and Python.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

Give an AI agent live access to Austin Open Data Portal through the Model Context Protocol. Add the Actor to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client:

$claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=parseforge/austin-crime-data-scraper"

Then prompt it in plain language to run the scraper and read back the results.

Troubleshooting

Why am I getting no results?

Check your filters. A narrow date range, uncommon crime type, or district number outside 1-10 can return zero records. Try clearing filters and running again.

The run is slow or times out.

Reduce maxItems or narrow the date range. The portal can be slow for very large requests.

Some fields are empty in the output.

Not every incident has all fields populated. Empty values are normal for optional data like location details.

I get an error about the date format.

Use YYYY-MM-DD format for startDate and endDate, for example 2024-01-01.

FAQ

Question	Answer
What data source does this Actor use?	It reads the Austin Open Data Portal, the official public dataset of APD crime incident reports.
Do I need an API key or login?	No. The Actor accesses the public portal directly, so no registration or token is required.
What filters can I apply?	You can filter by start and end date, crime type substring, council district (1-10), and family violence flag.
How many records can I collect?	Set maxItems to any number from 1 to 1,000,000 per run.
What format is the output?	Each incident is returned as a flat row with fields like offense type, date, location, and district. Export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML.
Can I search for a specific crime type?	Yes, use the crimeType filter with a substring like 'THEFT' or 'BURGLARY' (case-insensitive).
How do I filter by council district?	Enter a district number from 1 to 10 in the councilDistrict field.
What does the family violence flag do?	Set familyViolence to true to return only incidents marked as family violence.
Is the data real-time?	The portal is updated regularly by the city, and each run fetches the latest available records.
Can I schedule this Actor to run automatically?	Yes, use Apify's scheduler to run it daily, weekly, or on any cron schedule.

Related actors

Browse the full ParseForge collection for more scrapers.

🆘 Need help? Email parseforge@protonmail.com with your run ID, your input, and what you expected.

⚠️ Disclaimer. This Actor is unofficial and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by City of Austin. It collects only publicly available data. You are responsible for using the collected data in compliance with the source's terms of service and applicable data-protection laws, including GDPR, CCPA, and PIPL. Do not use it to collect personal data unlawfully.