Court Data Acquisition Policy

1. Our guiding test

Before we collect anything, we ask: would we be comfortable explaining exactly what our software does to the court's webmaster? If the answer is no, we don't do it. We collect openly, in modest amounts, from sources that permit it, and we never try to hide what we are doing.

2. Three source levels, in order of preference

1. Official APIs and open-data feeds. Data an agency publishes for reuse — open-data portals, map services, public data files, and documented feeds. This is always our first choice.
2. Permitted public pages and published reports. Only when no feed exists, and only when the site's robots.txt and its terms of use both allow automated access — for example, a court's published judge directory or a sheriff's published daily report.
3. Manual entry or licensed data. Where automated access isn't allowed, information is entered by hand from public sources, or obtained under a license or agreement with the record holder — never by working around the restriction.

Where none of these is available for a type of record, we simply don't offer it for that city.

3. What we check before using any source

• robots.txt for the exact host and path.
• Terms of use. A site can allow crawling in robots.txt yet forbid scraping or republishing in its terms — both must allow it.
• Technical barriers. We do not use any source behind a CAPTCHA, login, paywall, or bot-protection challenge.
• Licenses and redistribution limits, including court rules on bulk distribution.
• State law on which records may be published, and by whom.
• Personal data in the source, so we collect only the fields we need (see §6).

Every source is reviewed before it goes live, the review notes are kept with the source, and sources are re-checked when a site changes. Any source can be switched off immediately.

4. How our crawler behaves

• It identifies itself on every request, with a link to this page:InCourtBot/1.0 (+https://wichitaincourt.com/data-policy; public court records)
• It keeps volume modest. Large lists (rosters, warrant lists, filing reports) are imported on a schedule — typically once a day — and served from our own copy. Other data is cached for hours at a time. Requests to a source are made one after another, never in parallel bursts.
• Name lookups happen only when a visitor searches, one request per search, and results are cached.
• It never tries to avoid detection. No disguised browser identities, rotating IP addresses, CAPTCHA solving, bypassing logins or rate limits, or ignoring blocks.
• If a site blocks us or asks us to stop, we stop and, where appropriate, ask the webmaster how they'd prefer us to obtain the information.

5. Facts, not someone else's writing

Facts themselves generally aren't protected by copyright, but the way they are written, arranged, and presented may be. We collect factual data — a court's name and address, case numbers, filing dates, charges, hearing times, a judge's name and assignment — and present it in our own format with our own explanations. We don't republish a source's explanatory text, opinions, articles, photos, or other creative material, and we link back to the official source.

6. What we never collect or publish

• dates of birth, home addresses, Social Security or other ID numbers, or race;
• booking photographs (mugshots);
• health, medical, mental-health, or treatment information;
• juvenile records, or records that are sealed, expunged, or subject to nondisclosure;
• the identity of protective-order petitioners or crime victims, or map locations of sex offenses and domestic, child-victim, or elder-victim incidents.

More in our legal notice.

7. Salt Lake City sources right now

8. For court and agency webmasters

If our crawler causes you any trouble, or you'd like us to collect less often, use a different feed, or stop entirely, tell us and we'll act promptly. Contact admin@drcpwagnerventures.com. We're also happy to use an official feed or data agreement instead of your public pages.