Editorial Standards

Our sources

OpenArrest aggregates publicly available booking data from two Texas county jail systems:

• Travis County, Texas — Travis County Sheriff's Office (TCSO) custody records, including bookings by Austin Police Department (APD), University of Texas Police, Pflugerville PD, and other agencies whose arrestees are processed at the Travis County Correctional Complex.
• Bexar County, Texas — Bexar County Sheriff's Office (BCSO) custody records, including bookings by San Antonio Police Department (SAPD) and other agencies whose arrestees are processed at the Bexar County Adult Detention Center.

We do not source from third-party data brokers, mugshot resellers, or social media. Every record on this site can be traced back to an official county jail roster that is legally classified as a public record under the Texas Public Information Act (Government Code Chapter 552).

Update cadence

Our scraper polls each county's jail roster every 10 minutes. The timestamp on every booking page ("Record updated X minutes ago") reflects the last successful sync against the county's official roster — not the time we first saw the record.

If a county's official system is temporarily down or rate-limiting our requests, we retry on an exponential backoff and surface the staleness via the per-record timestamp. We do not publish stale data without an accurate update indicator.

Accuracy commitments

Every record on OpenArrest comes from an official source, but the original government data is not always perfect. We make four explicit commitments:

• We do not edit charge text or facts. The charge field on each record is what the booking officer entered, exactly as it appears on the county roster.
• We normalize charge slugs but preserve the original. When we group records by charge type (e.g., the charges index), we map variant spellings to a canonical slug, but the displayed charge text on the booking page is the unmodified original.
• We respect expungement and dismissal. If a court of competent jurisdiction has dismissed or expunged a case, contact us at [email protected] with documentation and we will suppress the record. Records older than 90 days are automatically marked as outdated and given lower visibility.
• We do not amplify guilt. Every record displays a prominent disclaimer: "An arrest is not a conviction. [Name] is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law." We do not use the data to imply criminality, and we do not republish the data in narrative form designed to harm reputation.

Corrections process

If you spot an error on a record — a misspelled name, wrong booking date, charge that does not match the court docket — please email [email protected] with the URL of the affected record and a description of the error.

We verify every correction against the county's official roster before making a change. If the error is on the county's side, we flag the discrepancy on the record and contact the source agency. If the error is on our side (e.g., a slug normalization bug), we fix it within one business day.

Records we will not publish

OpenArrest does not publish:

• Records involving sealed juvenile cases.
• Records where the underlying case has been formally dismissed or expunged.
• Records older than 90 days, by default (these are noindex'd and de-prioritized in our internal search).
• Records associated with active investigations where the source agency has requested temporary suppression.

Independence

OpenArrest accepts advertising from licensed Texas bail bondsmen and defense attorneys. Advertising relationships do not influence which records we publish or how we present them. Sponsored placements are clearly labeled. We do not accept payment to remove records — removal is governed by our Removal Policy, not by an editorial paywall.