Columbia dispatch scraper

Downloading and archiving raw data on fire and police calls in Columbia, MO.

This Python script:

1. Launches a Playwright browser that navigates to police and fire call dispatch pages
2. For each page, loads into a dataframe the data from an exported CSV containing the previous day's worth of calls
3. Sends a Slack alert with details for any new incidents, then adds these records to the data in the local files (columbia-fire-calls.csv and columbia-police-calls.csv)

A GitHub action runs this script every 30 minutes.

Running the download script

I'm using uv to manage Python dependencies.

1. Clone or download this repo and cd into the directory
2. uv sync
3. uv run main.py

Analyzing the data

Launch the notebook server: uv run jupyter lab. See Analysis.ipynb for a start.