Swedish Police Events Archive

68,000+ Swedish police events (2022-2025) queryable directly via DuckDB - no download required.

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Query Now

Analyze 2+ years of Swedish crime data directly from your terminal:

-- Top event types (run with: duckdb -c "...")
SELECT type, COUNT(*) as count
FROM 'https://github.com/dnouri/polisen-se-events-history/releases/download/data-latest/events.parquet'
GROUP BY type ORDER BY count DESC LIMIT 10;

┌───────────────────────────┬───────┐
│           type            │ count │
├───────────────────────────┼───────┤
│ Trafikolycka              │ 10434 │
│ Sammanfattning natt       │ 10092 │
│ Brand                     │  4407 │
│ Trafikkontroll            │  4068 │
│ Rattfylleri               │  4001 │
│ Misshandel                │  3124 │
│ Stöld                     │  2497 │
│ Trafikolycka, personskada │  2095 │
│ ...                       │   ... │
└───────────────────────────┴───────┘

-- Traffic accidents by city
SELECT location_name, COUNT(*) as accidents
FROM 'https://github.com/dnouri/polisen-se-events-history/releases/download/data-latest/events.parquet'
WHERE type = 'Trafikolycka'
GROUP BY location_name ORDER BY accidents DESC LIMIT 10;

┌──────────────┬───────────┐
│ location_name│ accidents │
├──────────────┼───────────┤
│ Malmö        │       466 │
│ Örebro       │       291 │
│ Helsingborg  │       257 │
│ Umeå         │       254 │
│ Göteborg     │       248 │
│ Sundsvall    │       227 │
│ Växjö        │       208 │
│ Luleå        │       206 │
│ ...          │       ... │
└──────────────┴───────────┘

-- Events per month
SELECT substr(datetime, 1, 7) as month, COUNT(*) as events
FROM 'https://github.com/dnouri/polisen-se-events-history/releases/download/data-latest/events.parquet'
GROUP BY month ORDER BY month DESC LIMIT 6;

┌─────────┬────────┐
│  month  │ events │
├─────────┼────────┤
│ 2025-11 │   2112 │
│ 2025-10 │   2151 │
│ 2025-09 │   2140 │
│ 2025-08 │   2060 │
│ 2025-07 │   1862 │
│ 2025-06 │   2108 │
└─────────┴────────┘

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Dataset Overview

Metric	Value
Total events	68,000+
Date range	Sept 2022 - Present
Event types	94 categories
Locations	311 municipalities
Update frequency	Daily (04:15 UTC)
Format	Apache Parquet (~11 MB)

All text is in Swedish. Event types (Trafikolycka, Misshandel, Stöld), summaries, and locations use Swedish terminology.

Top Event Categories

Swedish	English	Count
Trafikolycka	Traffic accident	10,434
Sammanfattning natt	Night summary	10,092
Brand	Fire	4,407
Trafikkontroll	Traffic control	4,068
Rattfylleri	Drunk driving	4,001
Misshandel	Assault	3,124
Stöld	Theft	2,497

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Data Schema

DESCRIBE SELECT * FROM 'events.parquet';

Column	Type	Description
event_id	VARCHAR	Unique identifier
datetime	VARCHAR	ISO 8601 timestamp with timezone
name	VARCHAR	Event title (Swedish)
summary	VARCHAR	Brief description
url	VARCHAR	Path to full report on polisen.se
type	VARCHAR	Event category (94 types)
location_name	VARCHAR	Municipality/city name
latitude	DOUBLE	WGS84 latitude
longitude	DOUBLE	WGS84 longitude
html_title	VARCHAR	Full title from archived HTML
html_preamble	VARCHAR	Summary paragraph
html_body	VARCHAR	Complete narrative text
html_published_datetime	VARCHAR	Publication timestamp
html_author	VARCHAR	Report author
html_available	BOOLEAN	Whether HTML was parsed

Location Precision

Coordinates are municipality centroids, not incident addresses. The Swedish Police API reports all events for a city at a single point (e.g., all Stockholm events at 59.33°N, 18.07°E). This affects analysis:

• Suitable for: Municipality-level aggregation, regional trends, event type distribution
• Not suitable for: Street-level analysis, neighborhood patterns, distance calculations

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Other Access Methods

Interactive Map

Live Site: dnouri.github.io/polisen-se-events-history

A basic web interface showing recent events (9-day window) with filtering by type and date.

Current Events JSON

# Latest ~500 events (9-day rolling window, updates every 30 min)
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dnouri/polisen-se-events-history/main/events.json | jq '.[0]'

{
  "id": 612685,
  "datetime": "2025-11-13 20:14:24 +01:00",
  "name": "13 november 18.28, Stöld, Härnösand",
  "summary": "Misstänkt stöld i butik, Kronholmen.",
  "type": "Stöld",
  "location": { "name": "Härnösand", "gps": "62.63227,17.940871" }
}

Clone Repository

# Full history (1.4+ GB due to HTML archive)
git clone https://github.com/dnouri/polisen-se-events-history.git

# Shallow clone (faster, ~1.1 GB)
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dnouri/polisen-se-events-history.git

Download Parquet

curl -LO https://github.com/dnouri/polisen-se-events-history/releases/download/data-latest/events.parquet

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How It Works

This project uses the git-scraping pattern to archive Swedish police events:

1. Every 30 minutes: GitHub Actions fetches https://polisen.se/api/events
2. HTML archival: Individual event pages are downloaded to html/ directory
3. Git history: Changes are committed, preserving full history
4. Daily export: All events are extracted from git history and published as Parquet

With 28,000+ commits over 2+ years, this provides a reliable historical dataset.

Data Pipeline

polisen.se/api/events (9-day rolling window)
    ↓ GitHub Actions (every 30 min)
events.json + html/{id}.html
    ↓ Git history (28,000+ commits)
export-events.py --include-html
    ↓ Daily release
events.parquet (68,000+ unique events)

Generate Parquet Locally

# Clone with full history
git clone https://github.com/dnouri/polisen-se-events-history.git
cd polisen-se-events-history

# Export all events (requires uv)
uv run export-events.py --include-html --output events.parquet

# Export specific date range
uv run export-events.py --start-date 2024-01-01 --end-date 2024-12-31 --output 2024.parquet

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Known Limitations

1. Municipality centroids: Coordinates are city center points, not actual incident locations
2. Night summaries: Sammanfattning natt entries aggregate multiple incidents (~15% of events)
3. Swedish only: All text in Swedish
4. HTML snapshots: Only first version of each event page is archived; updates are lost
5. 9-day API window: Historical data requires git archaeology or the Parquet export

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Data Source & Attribution

This project archives publicly available data from the Swedish Police Authority (Polismyndigheten).

Resource	Link
Official API	polisen.se/api/events
API Documentation	Öppna data - API över polisens händelser
Terms of Use	polisen.se

How Data Is Collected

This project uses automated git-scraping to archive the Police API's 9-day rolling window before events expire. The git-scraping pattern (by Simon Willison) enables historical preservation of otherwise ephemeral public data.

Legal Context

• Swedish PSI Law (Lag 2010:566): Permits reuse of public sector information
• Similar Projects: buren/polisen-api, LarsBergqvist/police-events

The Swedish Police API terms require a User-Agent header and impose rate limits (60 requests/hour). This project respects those limits.

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License

• Code: Public Domain
• Data: Derived from Swedish Police Authority public information