Uk Police Crime MCP Server README

Overview

Monthly street-level crime, police outcomes, and stop and search records from data.police.uk, plus the neighbourhood policing teams behind them. Covers the 43 territorial forces of England and Wales, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and British Transport Police, whose station records are the only coverage of Scotland. Search by point, polygon, map point, neighbourhood, or whole force; follow a crime's outcome history; find who polices a place. Runs as a stdio process, a local Streamable HTTP server, or the public hosted endpoint above.

Tools

Capability reference

ukcrime_list_reference _tool

• topic: forces, categories, availability, or neighbourhoods (needs force); name_contains filters forces and neighbourhoods by name, and month narrows availability to one row
• availability returns latest_month, earliest_month, and which forces published stop and search each month; with force, the months that force did and did not publish
• forces includes British Transport Police (btp) and each force's known coverage gaps; typed errors: force_required, unknown_force, invalid_filter

ukcrime_search_crimes _tool

• area: point (lat, lng; a 1-mile radius), polygon (3–2,500 vertices), location (location_id), neighbourhood (force + neighbourhood_id), or force_unplaced (force: the crimes it could not place); optional month (default: latest published), month_from (a range of up to 12 months ending at month), and category (default: every category)
• Returns total, by_category, by_outcome, up to 10 top_locations, and a page of crimes with the persistent_id that ukcrime_get_crime_outcomes takes; limit defaults to 25 (max 200), next_offset continues
• With month_from, the totals, breakdowns and top_locations cover the range, by_month gives each month's total, and rows page across it, oldest month first
• Failures carry a typed reason, such as month_not_published, unknown_category, or area_too_large; a range that cannot be fetched whole in one call fails range_incomplete (call again: fetched months stay cached) or range_too_large

ukcrime_search_outcomes _tool

• Same areas as ukcrime_search_crimes except force_unplaced; month is when the outcome was recorded, and category counts only outcomes for crimes in that category
• Returns total, unfiltered_total, by_outcome (code, name, count), by_crime_month, and a page of outcomes, each with its crime; limit defaults to 20 (max 200)
• Police outcomes only: court results are not published, and the result says when a force publishes no outcomes

ukcrime_get_crime_outcomes _tool

• persistent_ids: 1–25 64-character ids from ukcrime_search_crimes or ukcrime_search_outcomes; anti-social behaviour records carry none
• Each crime comes back with every outcome, oldest first; history_available: false marks a crime with no published history
• Unknown ids land in not_found and failed lookups in failed, so one bad id never fails the batch

ukcrime_search_stops _tool

• area: point, polygon, location, neighbourhood, or force (every stop the force published, placed or not); optional month and month_from, as on ukcrime_search_crimes; up to 8 filters on type, self_defined_ethnicity, officer_defined_ethnicity, outcome, object_of_search, legislation, age_range, gender, outcome_linked_to_object_of_search, or removal_of_more_than_outer_clothing (the last two take 'true', 'false' or '(not recorded)'; a JSON boolean also works)
• Returns total, unfiltered_total, unplaced, force_published (whether every force found for the area — the one it names, or those located at a point, a polygon's centre and outermost vertices, or a location's map point — published stop and search that month, or every month of a range), a breakdown per filterable field, and a page of stops; limit defaults to 15 (max 200)
• With month_from, by_month gives each month's total and its own force_published, so a month a force skipped reads as a gap, not a drop; the notice lists the months each force skipped
• Filters narrow breakdowns and page together, in every month of a range: filter one field and read another's breakdown for a cross-tab

ukcrime_find_neighbourhood _tool

• Look up by lat + lng or by force + neighbourhood_id; include picks priorities, team, events (the default three) and boundary
• Returns the force, the team's description, contact channels and stations, current priorities, every upcoming event the force published (soonest first), and the boundary as a polygon string the search tools accept
• Team entries carry only rank and name; biographies and personal contact details are not returned. A point outside coverage returns found: false with guidance

Features

Built on @cyanheads/mcp-ts-core: stdio and Streamable HTTP transports, pluggable auth (none / jwt / oauth), swappable storage (in-memory, filesystem, Supabase, Cloudflare KV/R2/D1), structured logging with optional OpenTelemetry tracing.

data.police.uk-specific:

• Every location is an anonymised map point covering at least eight addresses, never the place a crime or stop happened; outputs label it that way
• Validates locally what the upstream would silently widen: unknown categories, months outside the window, forces matching no id or name (Leicestershire Police works as well as leicestershire), and area fields the chosen area does not use
• Omitting month searches the latest published month and echoes it; per-force coverage gaps are dated and named in each result's notice
• A 12-month trend of crimes or stop and search is one call for most areas: month_from fetches the months two at a time and caches each for 15 minutes, so paging and a repeat send no area request; a large area that runs short of time fails range_incomplete, and the repeat fetches only the months still missing
• Requests are paced process-wide under data.police.uk's rate limit, with retries and in-process caches

Agent-friendly output:

• Every response carries the Open Government Licence attribution; all tools except ukcrime_list_reference add a data_note on what the records can and cannot say
• Totals and breakdowns cover every matched record; limit / offset / next_offset page the rows
• Typed failure reasons with a recovery hint, and a notice that separates "no data published" from "nothing happened"

Known limitations

• Only the latest 36 months are served; longer trends need the bulk archive at data.police.uk, which this server does not read
• A range covers at most 12 months, and ukcrime_search_outcomes takes one month at a time: an outcomes month not recently asked for can take data.police.uk 10–53 s to answer
• Greater Manchester Police publishes no crime, outcome or stop and search data; searches there return only other forces' or British Transport Police records
• Northern Ireland has no outcomes and no stop and search, and every crime other than anti-social behaviour carries the placeholder outcome Under investigation
• Court outcomes from June 2019 onward are not published
• data.police.uk can refuse an area holding more than about 10,000 records, whatever the category, and the point radius is fixed at one mile; dense city centres need polygons smaller than a borough
• The API reports which forces published stop and search each month, but not which supplied crime data, so a force that skipped a month shows as a thin or empty area; a low or zero count can mean missing data
• Many stops carry a blank outcome, reported as (not recorded); stop datetime is UTC while months follow UK local time

Getting started

Public Hosted Instance

A public instance is available at https://uk-police-crime.caseyjhand.com/mcp — no installation required. Point any MCP client at it via Streamable HTTP:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "uk-police-crime-mcp-server": {
      "type": "streamable-http",
      "url": "https://uk-police-crime.caseyjhand.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Self-Hosted / Local

Add the following to your MCP client configuration file.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "uk-police-crime-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "bunx",
      "args": ["@cyanheads/uk-police-crime-mcp-server@latest"],
      "env": {
        "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE": "stdio",
        "MCP_LOG_LEVEL": "info"
      }
    }
  }
}

Or with npx (no Bun required):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "uk-police-crime-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@cyanheads/uk-police-crime-mcp-server@latest"],
      "env": {
        "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE": "stdio",
        "MCP_LOG_LEVEL": "info"
      }
    }
  }
}

Or with Docker:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "uk-police-crime-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "docker",
      "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "-e", "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=stdio", "ghcr.io/cyanheads/uk-police-crime-mcp-server:latest"]
    }
  }
}

For Streamable HTTP, set the transport and start the server:

MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=http MCP_HTTP_PORT=3010 bun run start:http
# Server listens at http://localhost:3010/mcp

Prerequisites

• Bun v1.4.0 or higher (or Node.js v24+).
• No API key: data.police.uk is open and keyless.

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/cyanheads/uk-police-crime-mcp-server.git

2. Navigate into the directory:

cd uk-police-crime-mcp-server

3. Install dependencies:

bun install

Configuration

The server reads no environment variables of its own. It paces requests process-wide under data.police.uk's limit of 15 per second (burst 30); calls queue for their turn. When data.police.uk rate-limits the server, a Retry-After that leaves the call time for another attempt is waited out there; a longer one, or a rate limit that outlasts the retries, fails the call as rate_limited, naming the wait. A busy queue in this server fails as pacer_shed, an outage as upstream_unavailable, and a call that runs out of time as retry_deadline_exceeded; all four are retryable, and the hint names the wait when one is known.

See .env.example for the common framework overrides.

Running the server

Local development

• Build and run the production version:

  shCopy

  # One-time build
  bun run rebuild
  
  # Run the built server
  bun run start:http
  # or
  bun run start:stdio
  

• Run checks and tests:

  shCopy

  bun run devcheck  # Lints, formats, type-checks, and more
  bun run test      # Runs the test suite
  

Project structure

Development guide

See CLAUDE.md for development guidelines and architectural rules. The short version:

• Handlers throw, framework catches — no try/catch in tool logic
• Use ctx.log for logging, ctx.state for storage
• Register new tools in allToolDefinitions (src/mcp-server/tools/definitions/index.ts), which src/index.ts passes to createApp()
• Wrap external API calls: validate raw → normalize to domain type → return output schema; never fabricate missing fields

Contributing

Issues are welcome. Run checks and tests before submitting:

bun run devcheck
bun run test

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. See the LICENSE file for details.

Data: Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: data.police.uk. Every tool response carries this attribution; storing, caching and redistributing the data are permitted with it. This project is independent of the Home Office, data.police.uk and the police forces.