dead-drop vs UK Police

dead-drop is a minimal, self-hostable API for sharing ephemeral secrets: the client encrypts the payload before it ever reaches the server, so the backend only ever stores ciphertext it cannot read, and each secret can be set to self-destruct after a single view or a time limit. It needs no account or API key — requests are simply rate-limited per IP — and returns plain JSON over a small REST surface. The design mirrors the classic one-time-secret pattern used for sharing passwords or tokens without leaving a permanent copy anywhere.

The UK Police API publishes crime, stop-and-search, and neighbourhood-policing data reported by the 43 territorial forces of England and Wales, going back to December 2010 for street-level crime. It's a keyless JSON REST API -- force listings, neighbourhood team info, individual crime and outcome records, geo-radius crime queries -- released under the Open Government Licence, so results can be reused (including commercially) with attribution. Anonymous requests are capped at 15 per second with a burst of 30 before a 429 kicks in, comfortably enough for the dashboards and research tools that already build on it.