About Arlington Reports

Where the Arlington Data Comes From

Through our partnership, the Arlington Police Department provides Civic Informer with its calls-for-service records. Together, these records offer a broad view of the department’s daily work, from the calls officers respond to through the outcomes recorded when each call closes.

We use those recorded dispositions to identify which calls resulted in an incident report or an arrest. We then organize the information across time, place, and category so residents can understand the larger picture, not just isolated events.

We do not editorialize the department’s records. Our methods and the relationship between record types are documented in where the data comes from.

What We Publish for Arlington

• Police incident reports — Calls whose recorded disposition indicates that the department created an incident report or case, including reports filed online.
• Calls for service — Every call in the Arlington Police Department's daily export, regardless of how it was resolved.
• Arrests — Calls whose recorded disposition indicates an arrest or booking. These count arrest-related calls, not individual people.

How the Numbers Are Defined

The Activity Index is the single five-band reading shown across Arlingtonpages. Each band is a ratio of a count to its own typical, so “Typical” always means about the same as usual for whatever the reading is measured against. The city gauge compares the latest settled day against the city’s own trailing 30-day median; a neighborhood badge compares that neighborhood’s last 7 days against its own typical week. The bands below are read directly from the function every page uses, so they cannot drift from what you see.

Daily reports reflect the prior day’s activity and are published the following morning; pages are dated by publication. Every statistic is computed by a documented method, and every offense is categorized by a published crosswalk.

Full definitions live in how the stats are defined and how we categorize.

What This Is Not

• Block-level only — the live map generalizes every event to its block, never an exact address, to prevent address-level stigmatization. It is an incident map, not a crime map: it shows all police and fire activity, most of which involves no criminal offense.
• Not real-time — daily reports reflect the prior day, published each morning.
• Not a news outlet — we do not investigate, editorialize, or take policy positions.
• Not a surveillance tool — we do not publish individual identities or maintain publicly accessible person profiles.

The Full Methodology

Everything on this page is the short version. The complete, plain-English reference covers the platform end to end:

• Overview — The end-to-end journey from an official record to a published statistic.
• Where the data comes from — Per-city sources and agencies, and how record types differ.
• How we categorize — Category families and the full, live offense-to-category crosswalk.
• How the stats are defined — The Activity Index, response times, arrests, and date alignment.
• Editorial standards — Every sentence is computed from data by fixed templates.
• Limitations & accuracy — What the figures can and cannot tell you.