Download Local Crime Data
Legally scrape crime data from Citizen without violating their Terms of Service using a little-known technique involving HAR files. These let you record your web traffic as you use the Citizen website (while complying with its Terms), and we then scrape data from the recording instead of the actual website so the scraping activity is not governed by the Terms of Service.
1. Browse Citizen Data
Head to the Crime Search Feature and browse to any area you’d like to scrape the crime data for. Now right click on the page and hit “Inspect” to open developer tools and begin recording your web traffic. Refresh the page now to get Citizen to send data to your browser while you’re recording and pan around the map some more to load even more data into your browser.
2. Export & Download Data
Once you’ve browsed through enough data, go to the “Network” tab in your developer tools and click the down arrow labeled “Export HAR…” to download a HAR file with the raw Citizen data in it. Then upload that file to the HAR File Web Scraper and we’ll parse out the data so you can download crime incidents to CSV files for private use & analysis in any spreadsheet program like Excel.