Garland TX Police Activity Aggregator

This program downloads the previous week incident reports PDF from the Garland TX website and extracts text from the PDF file. It then goes through the text and pulls out the reports from the districts of interest and exports that data to a JSON file.

Data Source

The data is pulled from the Garland TX Police Department's weekly incident report PDF, which is available on their official website. Below is a screenshot of the PDF as downloaded and processed by this program:

The .env file needs to look something like this:

DISTRICTS_OF_INTEREST=41,42,43,44

Example output:

{
  "41": [
    {
      "date": "06/02/2025",
      "incident": "THEFT-ALL OTHER-$2,500 L/T $30,000",
      "location": "32XX HERRMANN DR"
    },
    {
      "date": "06/03/2025",
      "incident": "BURGLARY-VEH",
      "location": "20XX WESTCHESTER DR"
    }
  ]
}

Mapping the data

Below is a screenshot of the plotted incidents on a map. We roughly estimated the addresses by drawing a box between the beginning of the address range and the end of it.

Clicking on one of those blue boxes will show the full data we have on the incident:

Roadmap

• Convert FE to React
• Solidify the Readme and maybe convert the web scraping to TS so it can be triggered in a Vercel BE function or something
• Implement a top 10 incidents of the past 3 months (or something similar) that highlights more aggravated categories even in the past few weeks or months so that users have a better idea of whats going on even if something did not happen in the past week.
• Make the email recipient var a list and loop through it

Running the project

Web/PDF scrapper

cd scrape-incidents
pipenv run python src/main.py

Map visualizer

cd incident-geo-analysis/src
# run the program
node index.js

# run web server
npm run serve