Revamped Daily Police Log Now Available as Open Data

The City of Cambridge is pleased to announce that the Cambridge Police Department’s Daily Police Log is now available on the Cambridge Open Data Portal. This dataset provides a structured, machine-readable version of the daily incident logs that have long been available on the Police Department’s website in HTML format.

Each entry in the Daily Police Log represents a unique call for service or police report, covering a wide range of public safety activities—from thefts and traffic incidents to wellness checks and community calls. Now, for the first time, this data can be easily analyzed in bulk, enabling researchers, journalists, civic technologists, and community members to explore trends over time, map patterns across neighborhoods, and better understand the scope of police activity in Cambridge.

Why This Matters
Previously, the Daily Police Log was published exclusively as HTML news "stories", optimized for browsing one day at a time. While helpful for staying informed about specific incidents, this format posed a challenge for researchers or developers hoping to analyze trends over weeks, months, or years. Any effort to work with the data programmatically required scraping it manually—an error-prone and time-consuming task.

With this new dataset, we’re removing that barrier. The data is now structured, searchable, and exportable—supporting a wide range of potential uses from neighborhood safety analysis to academic research and civic reporting.

This new dataset builds on the comprehensive work already provided by the Police Department’s award-winning Crime Analysis Unit, which produces monthly “BridgeStat” crime reports, an annual crime report, as well as special reports. 

What's Included
The dataset includes the date and time of each report, a general type and more specific subtype (often referencing Massachusetts General Laws), a narrative description, and a general location (such as street name or block).

To protect the privacy of individuals involved, personally identifiable information is not included, and exact addresses are not published.

Current and Future Coverage
The dataset currently includes records from January 2025 to present, and new logs are added automatically as they become available. We are actively working on expanding the dataset to include historical logs going back to 2013, which are currently only available in HTML format. This involves a careful quality assurance process to ensure completeness and consistency.

Dual Publication
We recognize that different audiences access this information in different ways. That’s why our current publication process automatically generates both the structured dataset on the Open Data Portal and the traditional daily HTML log pages on the Police Department’s website. This ensures that casual readers and data analysts alike can find the information in the format that best suits their needs.

If you explore the dataset and have feedback or ideas for how we can make it more useful, we’d love to hear from you. This is part of our ongoing effort to make public data more accessible, transparent, and impactful for all who live and work in Cambridge.