Austin Metro — Real-Time Public Safety Intelligence
Total homicides: — (includes 3 victims from Mar 1 mass shooting — 1 marker)
Most recent: —
Hot zone: —
Source: APD press releases + Battle Buddy scanner
View:

▲ Legend

Incident density
APD Press Release (verified)
Scanner detection
Shooting / Homicide
Stabbing
Other violent crime
Click any marker for details
and press release links.
✓ VERIFIED APD Press Releases Official homicide announcements published at austintexas.gov/news. Each incident links directly to the source document.
■ SCANNER Battle Buddy Scanner Detection Incidents detected via P25 radio monitoring and AI transcription. Not yet confirmed by press release.
▶ LIVE Self-Updating New APD press releases are detected automatically within 5 minutes of publication and added to this map.
🔬 Methodology (for nerds)

Data Sources

Primary source: APD homicide press releases published at austintexas.gov/news. Battle Buddy polls this page every 5 minutes. New articles matching homicide/shooting/death keywords trigger automatic article retrieval, address extraction, and geocoding.

Secondary source: Battle Buddy’s P25 radio scanner pipeline. The system monitors Austin’s GATRRS trunked radio system (WPQY813, 851 MHz, P25 Phase II), transcribes audio using faster-whisper large-v3-turbo (INT8 quantized), and classifies incidents using Groq’s llama-3.3-70b-versatile LLM. Scanner detections are flagged separately from press-release-verified incidents.

Geocoding

Street addresses are extracted from press release body text using regex pattern matching and geocoded via Nominatim (OpenStreetMap) with Austin, TX and Travis County, TX fallbacks for rural addresses. Incidents without a resolvable address are excluded from the map but still appear in Talk alerts.

Seed Dataset

The 2026 dataset was bootstrapped on April 6, 2026 by manually compiling all APD homicide press releases from January 1–April 5, 2026 (16 confirmed incidents, covering Austin’s 1st through 18th homicide of the year). All seed records were individually verified against official press releases and geocoded.

Limitations

  • Homicides where APD has not yet published a press release will not appear in the verified dataset.
  • Scanner detections depend on radio traffic being unencrypted. APD patrol channels (TGIDs 960–987) went to AES-256 encryption in March 2026, significantly reducing real-time APD intelligence.
  • Geocoding accuracy is address-level (not GPS-precise). Block-range addresses are plotted at the midpoint.
  • The March 1, 2026 mass shooting at 700 W 6th Street is counted as a single map point but represents 3 homicide victims (Austin’s 12th–14th of the year).

Technology Stack

Battle Buddy runs on a Contabo VPS (Ubuntu 24.04, 24 GB RAM). Radio capture via RTL-SDR on a Raspberry Pi 5. P25 trunked decoding via OP25 (GNU Radio). Web stack: Python/Flask, SQLite, Nginx. Map: Leaflet.js + leaflet.heat. Geocoding: geopy/Nominatim.