Analyzing 5 Years of Police Call Data

San Antonio is a great city. According to Yelp, there are over 1200 places to get a taco - how could it not be great?

Unfortunately, any time you get a huge group of people together there will be crime, and SA is no exception. Our SAPD stay busy 247, constantly putting their lives on the line to keep the city safe, and I’m thankful for all the work they do.

Being an amateur API aficionado, I was excited to find the SAPD Open Data Initiative that contains a wealth of information on the activities the SAPD perform. Specifically, I wanted to see what kinds of analytics I could gather from exploring the historic SAPD call data.

In this post, I’ll explain how I was able to gather and analyze 4.3 million call data records, or how I basically became the extremely boring part of Batman.

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2 Years of @dumpmon

Introduction

This post is long overdue.

Back in May 2013, I released a Twitter bot called @dumpmon whose sole purpose was to track and report password dumps and other sensitive information shared on paste sites such as Pastebin. Since that time, dumpmon has proven - to my excitement - to be valuable to researchers, being featured in news articles, Defcon slides, and HIBP!

After two years, it’s time to post an overdue status update providing some insight into the data dumpmon has collected over this time.

Note: This is a pretty long post, so feel free to skip here if you just want the data.

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