# 👮 Find-CrimeUK Powershell Module

By

Adam Bacon

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Powershell

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Modules

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Published 2022-08-19

Yep same boring old story, I been looking at existing public APIs out there that require no authentication or key to be used. This is so if you do decide to download this module you do not need to sign up for an API key.

I had a mate phone me about all these cops that were parked up down the road, seemed like a pretty big raid to have that much police and wagons involved. Anyways that got me thinking I wonder if this will be in the local paper? Will I ever know about what type of crime was happening around the corner? I feel like I had a right to know, but in reality it probably will not appear in the paper.

So a bit of internet searching later, and I found that the UK police force has an API which will allow me to obtain this information. Although this information might not be updated immediately I am confident that it will be on there once the police record it.

However if you look at the API instead of the Police making this easy enough for the general public to use, they made it so it would only accept the URL if it contained a latitude and longitude and the date in a YYYY-MM format. A bit like the internet us humans cannot remember long number of digits like random IP addresses or longitudes or latitudes. So I built in a sub-function to allow me to over-come this. For this I used the following API

Using this API as a sub-function it would allow me to use location names in the main-function, rather than getting the end-user to look up their latitude and longitude location to be able to use this function. So in my head this is what the police should have done to make this more user-friendly. I can only assume they did not, as when you specify a city name, this can return lots of different latitudes and longitudes for that destination.

You may or may not know about API aka Application Programming Interface. So here is some brief documentation

As I want to find out information about crimes that had happened. Find seemed like the best choice of verb to use.

Remember if you are unsure of what verb you can use, or what verb you should use, then please check out the link below for full explanation.

Due to me not adding decent help on more than one occasion. I am now determined to make sure I include decent help to allow the average person like myself to understand how to get using the module in as little time as possible.

NAME
    Find-CrimeUK

SYNOPSIS
    UK Police API


SYNTAX
    Find-CrimeUK [-LocationName] <String> -Year <String> -Month <String> [<CommonParameters>]


DESCRIPTION
    Do you like to fight crime? Okay how about do you like to find crime? Well now you can, maybe you want to know how much crime is in your area, maybe you looking to move to a new place in the UK but do not know the local crime scene. Maybe you a gangster and want to see how little crime there is in a given area to then go cause some mayhem. Well what-ever your reasons, you too can now be a crime investigator, by finding crime and the outcome if the police have bothered to update it. Finally for me this was amazing to see all the unsolved crime in my area, broken Britain at its best.


PARAMETERS
    -LocationName <String>

        Required?                    true
        Position?                    1
        Default value
        Accept pipeline input?       false
        Accept wildcard characters?  false

    -Year <String>

        Required?                    true
        Position?                    named
        Default value
        Accept pipeline input?       false
        Accept wildcard characters?  false

    -Month <String>

        Required?                    true
        Position?                    named
        Default value
        Accept pipeline input?       false
        Accept wildcard characters?  false

    <CommonParameters>
        This cmdlet supports the common parameters: Verbose, Debug,
        ErrorAction, ErrorVariable, WarningAction, WarningVariable,
        OutBuffer, PipelineVariable, and OutVariable. For more information, see
        about_CommonParameters (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=113216).

INPUTS

OUTPUTS

NOTES


        Information on crime in the UK from the UK Police API

    -------------------------- EXAMPLE 1 --------------------------

    PS > Find-CrimeUK -Town Gosport -Year 2022 -Month 02






    -------------------------- EXAMPLE 2 --------------------------

    PS > Find-CrimeUK -City Portsmouth -Year 2022 -Month 03






    -------------------------- EXAMPLE 3 --------------------------

    PS > Find-CrimeUK -LocationName Bridgemary -Year 2020 -Month 01

Doh! I just noticed I did not include specific help for each parameter. So maybe I should just write that now, to justify this human error. So this time I decided to give the -LocationName parameter a few alias names City, Town and Village just figured these alias names for the LocationName parameter might make more sense to you depending on where you live. Next the -Year parameter has a validate set parameter, as this API has not been around all that long I figured a paramter validate set would be best to use to force the end-user to only select one of three different years. Lastly the -Month parameter needed the month to be entered in a two digit format. Again to avoid human error I decided a validate set was best to use for this parameter, again forcing the end-user using this to select a correct value that would be accepted by the API.