Every morning at nine, the daily Arlington e-mail arrives in subscribers’ inboxes. The daily email covers what the Arlington Police Department handled the day before, built from the Department's own records and assembled into digestible views. This guide walks the email top to bottom, in the order the sections appear.
What arrives, and when
The daily e-mail sends at 9:00 a.m. Pacific, seven days a week, from arlington@civicinformer.com. Each edition covers activity from the previous calendar day, so any calls received within the nine hour span from midnight and the 9am report are not covered.
The e-mail reports activity from the previous day, not “this morning”. For something happening now, call 911 for emergencies.
The subject line and the preview text
The subject line and preview text are how the email shows in your inbox, and are what subscribers read first. The subject counts the day, in the form "Arlington Daily Brief: 52 calls for service, 8 incidents, 3 arrests." The preview text underneath restates the same figures as a sentence opening with "Yesterday in Arlington."
Both lines are built from the day's records rather than written by hand. Notably, the arrest figure appears only when there were arrests.
The four numbers at the top
At the top of the email are a handful of overview stats, including calls, reports, arrests, and non-violent percentage.
- Calls: The sum of requests for police service logged throughout the previous day, and are non-criminal more often than not. A false alarm, a welfare check, and a traffic stop are all calls, and most close without any report being written.
- Reports: The sum of calls that became a formal incident report. A call reaches that status when the Department closes it with an arrest, a booking, or a case report, or when a resident files it through the My Crime Report online system. Between June 1 and September 16th 2026, roughly 13 percent of Arlington calls became reports.
- Arrests: The sum of calls that ended in an arrest or a booking. An arrest is a police action, not a finding of guilt. This tile disappears on a day with none, so a row of three numbers means the day produced no arrests rather than a missing figure.
- Nonviolent: The percentage of that day's reports that Civic Informer classified as non-violent. The classification is a taxonomy applied to the call type, not a police finding. For the full violent classification methodology, see our methodologies.
Calls for service, then incident reports
The Arlington Police Dept. section repeats the two headline counts at larger size, calls first and reports second. Each carries a small comparison chip reading "vs" and an abbreviated weekday, so "vs Mon" tells you how the number moved against Monday's. The day over day change is a contextual frame amongst moving numbers, not an acknowledgement of patterns or direction. Arlington averaged 63.9 calls a day between June 1 and September 16th 2026, and adjacent days can swing widely around it.
Calls by Category
The list headed Calls by Category sums the day's calls into buckets and shows the top five with counts, then a short line noting how many categories did not fit. For example, September 15th produced 19 distinct categories from 52 calls. Administrative led with 11, followed by Traffic Enforcement with 9 and Suspicious with 6. Administrative sitting at the top is normal for Arlington - covering follow-ups, records work, and other police business rather than events in the street.
Incidents by Neighborhood
Three horizontal bars rank the areas where the day's incident reports were filed. These bars count reports rather than calls, so their numbers run much smaller than the figure at the top of the email. On September 15th, Old Town accounted for five of the eight reports, with Crown Ridge and Island Crossing at one each.
Arlington is divided into fourteen areas drawn from the City's own Subareas and Neighborhoods GIS layer.
Reports themselves are not a measure of crime, and therefore, the incidents by neighborhood section is not a measure of whether a particular neighborhood or street is safe. Each area name in the email links to that area's own neighborhood page to explore this information in more detail.
Time of Day
Below the neighborhood bars, four tiles divide the day into six-hour windows.
- Overnight: midnight to 6 a.m.
- Morning: 6 a.m. to noon.
- Afternoon: noon to 6 p.m.
- Evening: 6 p.m. to midnight.
The busiest of the four windows is filled solid navy, except for when two windows tie - then neither is filled. From June 1st to September 16th, the afternoon window has seen 36 percent of Arlington's calls, while overnight has seen 12 percent.
What the web report adds
The “View the full report” button opens the online version of that day’s report, which remains continuously accessible at civicinformer.com/arlington/reports. The web version carries what a one-screen email cannot, including the activity index, an hour-by-hour analysis, interactive map, and log of every call from that day as its own row, with the time, the call type, the hundred block, and the neighborhood.
Arrests, on the days there are any
One more section sits below the button on days that produced an arrest. This section opens with the day's arrest total and its day over day change, followed by a sentence sharing what led to the arrest, then a short ranked list of the categories that led to arrests.
The section closes with a line that is important to keep in mind, “an arrest is not a conviction, and everyone is presumed innocent unless a court decides otherwise”. On a day with no arrests, the whole section is absent.
Replying, and unsubscribing
Every Brief has a reply-to address of contact@civicinformer.com, and reaches Civic Informer rather than the Police Department. For questions that Civic Informer can’t answer regarding a specific case or a records request, residents should go to the Department directly. Police Support Services takes records questions at 360-403-3400 on weekdays.
Clicking the Unsubscribe button at the bottom will remove you from the Arlington daily e-mail list, and works in one click. The same footer links the Department's own X, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts alongside a button back to the Arlington hub.
Civic Informer is an additional way to see what the Department responds to. It does not replace the Department's own channels, its emergency notifications, or the public records process, and the Department remains the authoritative source for official information.
Explore Arlington: read the most recent daily report, browse every past report, open the live map to see where the day's calls landed, or compare the fourteen neighborhoods.