Crime news API
Criminal incidents, policing outcomes, courts and organised crime. Pass topic=SOC_GENERALCRIME to filter.
What does the crime topic actually cover?
Individual incidents, investigations and their outcomes, court proceedings, and organised and financial crime. Overwhelmingly local in origin, with a thin national layer for cases that become emblematic.
How do I filter news to crime?
Pass topic=SOC_GENERALCRIME on /search or /stories. Bound geographically, always. Crime coverage is produced by local newsrooms for local readers, and an unscoped query returns whichever incidents crossed into national coverage that week, which is a selection on severity and novelty rather than on anything you are likely to be measuring.
GET /stories?topic=SOC_GENERALCRIME&mode=hybrid&from=2026-07-24&limit=20What catches people out with crime coverage?
Using volume as a crime rate. Coverage density tracks how many journalists are employed in a place, not how much crime occurs there. A city with a healthy local press generates far more crime coverage than a comparable city whose newsroom closed, and the difference reads as a crime wave. This comparison is invalid across places and it is made constantly.
Who publishes on it
Local titles produce nearly all of it and are the only source with routine access to police and court proceedings. National press covers a small, unrepresentative selection. Court reporting specifically has declined sharply in many markets, so absence of proceedings coverage says more about newsroom budgets than about the courts.
In the sample, 852 outlets carry crime coverage at about 2
articles each. The busiest is iheart.com at roughly 7%,
and iheart.com, tribunnews.com, respublika.lt account for about 11% between them.
Flat enough that volume here translates fairly directly into independent reporting rather than one newsroom publishing repeatedly.
What it is best for
Best for incident awareness in a named place, and for following a specific case through the courts. Never appropriate for comparing crime between places, and weak for trends unless you are confident the local newsroom has been equally staffed throughout.
Monitoring it over time
Compare a place against its own history and nothing else. Even then, watch for the discontinuity that a newsroom closing or a title being acquired introduces — it looks exactly like a sudden drop in crime, arrives without warning, and is permanent.
Which signals pair with crime?
Topic filtering answers what an article is about. Signals answer how strongly it reads that way and in what register, so combining them is usually sharper than either alone.
conflict— Armed conflict and hostilitiesanxiety— Public alarm and apprehensionlegal_litigation— Proceedings, claims, regulatory action
GET /search?topic=SOC_GENERALCRIME&signal=conflict&signal_min=0.25Recent coverage
From the index on 2026-07-31, in the language each was published in.
- Labor MP to fight assault charges amid court case
- Firefighters battle the last hot spots of a monster wildfire...
- Southport killer charged with assaults on prison staff at Belmarsh
- acquitted Archives - online
- Man Arrested in Cyprus on Suspicion of Spying on a UK Military Base for Iran
- Labor MP to fight assault charges amid court case
- Antiques Stolen in Crimestoppers Crime Spotlight
- Labor MP to fight assault charges amid court case
Who covers it
iheart.com · tribunnews.com · respublika.lt · naslovi.net · inewsgr.com · kompas.com · zazoom.it · indiatimes.com · bt.dk · reflector.com · baomoi.com · haberler.com
Counts are provisional pending a snapshot against the API.