Police Shootings MCP Server

@pipeworx/police-shootings

U.S. fatal police shootings since 2015 — aggregate counts, individual incident records (including the name of the person killed, as published), and per-agency breakdowns, proxied live from The Washington Post's Fatal Force database.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1784+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• police_shootings_summary(group_by?, state?, year?) — aggregate counts (by state, year, race, armed_with, threat_type, gender, mental_illness, or body_camera). Never returns names.
• police_shootings(state?, city?, year?, armed_with?, race?, limit?, offset?) — individual incident records, including the name of the person killed. Small by default (limit 25, max 200); a truncated response carries truncated:true, total_matching, and a narrowing hint.
• agency_shootings(agency, state?) — one law-enforcement agency's fatal-shooting count and breakdown by year/race/armed_with. Matches on a name fragment; returns a small list of candidates when more than one agency matches, rather than guessing.

Auth

Keyless. The upstream is a public CSV with no registration, key, or login.

Data sources

• The Washington Post, Fatal Force database — fatal shootings by on-duty police officers in the United States since Jan. 1, 2015, plus the roster of law-enforcement agencies involved. Published under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0); every tool response carries license and attribution fields so the terms travel with the data. This pack is a LIVE PROXY — it fetches the Post's published files fresh on every cache miss (6h edge cache, same as any normal client would cache) and never commits the dataset into this repo (CLAUDE.md "mirror-needs-grant-proxy-does-not": a per-request proxy call is not redistribution; bulk-copying the dataset would be, and the licence forbids that). Human-facing page: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/. Routes live only in src/index.ts.

Notes

• The Post's own README states the data is "updated regularly," but the published file this pack reads currently ends 2024-12-31 (verified live 2026-10-13) — there is no newer data to proxy. Every response's data_as_of / dataset_coverage.max_date reflects whatever the Post has actually published at call time, not a fixed claim.
• The Post tracks only on-duty police shootings paralleling the Michael Brown case — not deaths in custody, off-duty shootings, or non-shooting deaths. It is not comprehensive beyond that scope (the Post itself notes undercounting is possible before reporting catches up).
• race and armed_with can carry more than one value per incident, semicolon-separated in the source (e.g. "W;B", "gun;knife"). The race and armed_with filters in police_shootings/police_shootings_summary match if the requested value is ANY one of the semicolon-separated tokens.
• agency_ids on an incident can list more than one agency (semicolon-separated) when multiple departments were involved; agency_shootings joins on that list.
• Names, ages, and other person-level fields are served exactly as the Post publishes them — nothing is added, inferred, or joined against any other people-data source.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "police-shootings": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/police-shootings/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/police-shootings/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1784+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/police_shootings_summary \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"group_by":"year"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/police_shootings_summary. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "police-shootings": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-police-shootings"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-police-shootings

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Police Shootings data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT