Why this city's numbers say when they were taken

San Diego publishes its whole transactional record as files with no way to query them. So this report holds a copy, and tells you how old it is.

There is no API

San Diego's open-data portal lists 122 datasets and serves every one of them as a CSV download. There is no Socrata, no ArcGIS feature service, no query string that returns a subset. The building permit file for a single year is 19 MB; a year of crime is 29 MB and 77,845 rows.

So the report holds a copy

Each stream is downloaded, reduced to four numbers a row — a latitude, a longitude, the day as an integer and an index into a list of category names — and kept. A radius query is then a box filter and a distance check over an array, which is instant. The copy is refreshed twice a day.

And says so

Every other city in this product can say its counts were read live at the moment you asked. This one cannot, so each stream section carries the date its copy was taken. If that date looks old, the section is old, and you are looking at the reason rather than at a claim.

About three per cent of crime rows carry no usable coordinate. They are dropped rather than counted somewhere they did not happen, which is why a city total here is slightly below the city's own published total.

Counts run 5 September 2026.