Posted: Christmas Day 2025
With eight updates officially logged, TexArrest is now operating in a hybrid state of daily production scraping and active full-stack feature development.
The scraper pipelines for Travis County, Collin County, and Milam County are now running reliably and uploading new arrest records and mugshots almost every day. This confirms that TexArrest’s automation layer is stable enough for ongoing daily operations while new county systems are analyzed and onboarded.
📅 Daily Scraping Is Now Live
TexArrest has officially begun running daily scrape sessions for counties where public arrest data and booking details are available. The platform is now:
- Detecting new arrests
- Posting records quickly
- Indexing offenses under the improved taxonomy filters
- Publishing mugshots when images are publicly released
This marks the shift from large batch testing into continuous daily ingestion cycles.
🤖 Scaling the TexBot County Fleet
A lesson was learned during earlier development:
Attempting to combine all Tyler Technologies jail system counties into one master bot created pipeline interference during testing cycles. Debugging one county would pause or disrupt scraping in others.
To eliminate that bottleneck, TexArrest adopted a new strategy:
One scraper bot per county, running independently.
This allows:
- Parallel scraping
- Isolated cookie and session handling
- Faster onboarding cycles
- Debugging without county interference
Live Bots Now Operational
- TexBot Austin (Travis County + APD integration)
- TexBot WilCo
- TexBot Milam
- TexBot Collin
These bots are now part of TexArrest’s internal software fleet, each handling county-level scraping and publishing without reliance on the original (“OG”) WilCo codebase.
🔤 WilCo Wildcard Discovery Upgrade
In addition to finishing the WilCo scraper automation, TexArrest has now upgraded its surname discovery system by expanding wildcard support during scrape sessions.
This enhancement:
- Detects missed records per scrape cycle
- Re-queues names that failed earlier
- Expands surname lists using dynamic wildcard patterns
- Flags blank image fields to detect scrape failures
- Improves mugshot recovery logic automatically
This new wildcard intelligence allows TexArrest to recover missed mugshots at scale and continue growing its dataset efficiently.
🧩 Taxonomy Normalization: Still in Progress
The offense taxonomy bug turned out to be a larger engineering challenge than expected.
Because counties often label the same arresting offense using different signatures, abbreviations, formatting, or combined metadata strings, charge tagging inconsistencies surfaced between counties like Travis and Collin.
Fixing this requires:
- Expanding offense normalization rules
- Filtering out mixed agency + offense strings
- Regrouping identical statute offenses under unified tags
- Preserving original charge text without misclassification
A cleanup pass is planned once all county pipelines stabilize.
📈 Dataset Momentum & Search Engine Growth
In the first 10 days since Google indexing began, TexArrest has achieved:
- 1,000+ organic clicks
- 3,000+ impressions
- Average search position: 4.1
Additionally:
- 2.5K users in the last 28 days
- 300+ active users per day
- Growth continues as records are added daily
This is wild — especially for a site submitted to Google only weeks ago.
🚀 What’s Next
- Continue daily scrapes and record uploads
- Expand the TexBot county fleet
- Complete Tarrant County onboarding for non-Tyler jail systems
- Expand offense taxonomy normalization filters
- Begin pushing out Tyler-based counties faster
TexArrest is now ready to scale faster than other mugshot aggregator sites — while keeping the data free and publicly accessible.
More updates coming soon.