Crime-data transparency · 30 cities · 4 countries · 2026-08-12

Which cities let you see their crime?

Name: SafeRoute Crime-Data Transparency Index
Creator: SafeRoute

This is not a ranking of how safe places are. It measures something different and rarely looked at: how well each police force actually publishes its crime data — how current it is, how much detail each record carries, how much of the criminal code is visible, and how far back you can look.

Two British police forces publish essentially nothing

Both appear in the national open-data service. Both have force pages, neighbourhood listings and a published API. Neither supplies meaningful street-level crime, in their own city centres or anywhere else.

Gloucestershire Constabulary1 crime in the busiest neighbourhood sampled
Greater Manchester Police6 crimes in the busiest neighbourhood sampled

Measured across 44 UK forces. For comparison, a point a few miles outside Greater Manchester — in Lancashire — returns 260 crimes for the same month, and Bristol returns 1,691.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Anyone building a "safest cities" ranking from open data — and plenty of people do — is quietly ranking publishing practice alongside crime. A city that releases nothing looks flawless. Greater Manchester and Gloucestershire would top a British safety league table built this way, purely because there is nothing to count.

The same problem runs through the detail. Washington D.C. publishes only Part I offences, so no simple assault, drugs, vandalism or public-order incidents appear at all. Toronto publishes five categories. New Orleans publishes 911 dispatches rather than confirmed reports. London's feed covers a rolling month; Dallas's covers a year. Put those side by side on one scale and the narrower feed always wins.

That is why SafeRoute's own safety index is calibrated within each city and never across them — and why the honest thing to publish globally is this: not who is safest, but who lets you check.

The index

Scored out of 100 across four equally weighted measures. Every bar below is the score taken apart — a number you cannot decompose is exactly what this page argues against.

FreshnessDetailBreadthHistory Not measurable — excluded

Measured on all four

24 cities whose feeds could be tested on every measure. Dallas leads on 99; Tucson is lowest of this group on 63.

	City	Score	How it breaks down
1	🇺🇸 DallasDallas Open Data	99
2	🇺🇸 NashvilleNashville Open Data	90
3	🇺🇸 San FranciscoDataSF	89
4	🇺🇸 SeattleSeattle Open Data	89
5	🇺🇸 ClevelandCity of Cleveland Open Data	89
6	🇺🇸 ChicagoChicago Data Portal	88
7	🇺🇸 Kansas CityKansas City Open Data	88
8	🇺🇸 New OrleansCity of New Orleans / OPCD	88
9	🇺🇸 DetroitCity of Detroit Open Data	87
10	🇺🇸 MemphisCity of Memphis Open Data	87
11	🇺🇸 Los AngelesLA City Open Data	86
12	🇺🇸 BaltimoreOpen Baltimore	85
13	🇺🇸 Las VegasLVMPD Open Data	84	no incident time
14	🇺🇸 DenverOpen Data Denver	83
15	🇺🇸 Washington DCOpen Data DC	77	only 6 offence categories
16	🇺🇸 New YorkNYC Open Data	76
17	🇺🇸 CharlotteCity of Charlotte Open Data	75	no incident time
18	🇺🇸 HoustonCity of Houston / HPD	75	30-day window
19	🇨🇦 VancouverVancouver Police Department	74	only 7 offence categories · no incident time
20	🇺🇸 HartfordCity of Hartford	73	no incident time
21	🇺🇸 MinneapolisCity of Minneapolis Open Data	70	no incident time
22	🇨🇦 TorontoToronto Police Service	70	only 5 offence categories
23	🇺🇸 Long BeachCity of Long Beach	68	no incident time
24	🇺🇸 TucsonCity of Tucson	63	40-day window · no incident time

Measured on three of four

These 6 feeds report only the month of their newest record, not the date, so freshness could not be tested. They are scored on the other three and shown separately — ranking them against the group above would compare different measurements, which is the error this page exists to point out.

	City	Score	How it breaks down
1	🇺🇸 BostonAnalyze Boston	85	freshness not measurable
2	🇺🇸 Fort WorthCity of Fort Worth Open Data	85	freshness not measurable
3	🇲🇽 Mexico CityHoyo de Crimen (api.hoyodecrimen.com) · CDMX FGJ	85	freshness not measurable · only 7 offence categories
4	🇺🇸 PhiladelphiaOpenDataPhilly	83	freshness not measurable
5	🇺🇸 San DiegoCity of San Diego	63	freshness not measurable · no incident time
6	🇬🇧 Londondata.police.uk	49	freshness not measurable · 30-day window · no incident time

How it is measured

Each city's live feed is queried directly — a 2000m box at each city's central coordinate. Nothing here is taken on trust or from documentation; every value comes from asking the feed what it actually returns today.

Freshness — how many days since the newest incident.
Detail — whether a record carries a clock time as well as a date, and a usable coordinate.
Breadth — how many distinct offence categories appear. Twelve or more indicates an all-crime feed.
History — how long a period the feed covers, up to a year.

Publishing at all is a gate, not a scored category. A force that releases nothing is not "40% of a good feed" — it is the headline above, and it is excluded from the table rather than given a low score.

Where something could not be measured, it is excluded and the score normalised over the rest, marked with a hatched segment. 6 of the 30 feeds report only the month of their newest record rather than the date, so freshness is not scored for those — scoring it would rank cities on our own summarising rather than on their data.

Weights: freshness 25 · detail 25 · breadth 25 · history 25. Disagree with them? The underlying components are all shown, so any row can be recomputed by hand.

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