The live map at /arlington/map plots police activity in Arlington, Washington, one pin per event, for whatever stretch of time you choose. This guide covers what the pins mean, what the controls do, and two pieces that are important to understand: how precise a pin is, and how current it is. Everything on the map comes directly from the Arlington Police Department's daily export of calls for service, and uses no externally sourced activity data.
What the map plots
Every row in the activity feed and every mark on the map starts as a call for service, meaning a request for police time. Most calls end with on-scene problem solving, some end with an incident report, and a smaller number end with an arrest.
The Police section of the control panel lists the marker types, and each row carries the same glyph the map draws. That panel is the legend, and every row shows a count for the window you are looking at and a checkbox that removes that type from the map, the feed, and the counts.
- Call: A request for police time that cleared without a report, where most calls end.
- Incident: A call that resulted in an incident report with a case number. Since June 1, about 13 percent of calls became incidents.
- Arrest: A call whose recorded outcome was an arrest or jail booking. An arrest is a police action, not a finding of guilt.
- Violent and Violent Arrest: An incident or arrest classified as violent by Civic Informer when the call type is domestic violence, assault, or robbery.
Checking a single row while the police layer is switched off isolates the map to that one type, which is the fastest way to see arrests alone.
Setting the time window
From the main navigation, the live map opens on the last 7 days. The presets are 48H, 7D and 30D, and Custom opens ‘From’ and ‘To’ fields you type as year, month and day. Historical data on the map is limited to our inventory, which currently spans from June 1st, 2026.
The Share view button at the bottom of the panel copies a link carrying your current window and filters, so the person you send it to opens the same view rather than the default one.
Category filters
Every call type from dispatch maps to one of the 80 categories in Civic Informer's Category Standard, which roll up into eight families. The Categories section of the panel starts collapsed and has a search field, because the list is long. Rows are sorted by volume and carry their sum for the selected timeframe.
Arlington's largest categories since June 1st are Administrative, Traffic Enforcement, and Suspicious. Checking one row narrows the map to that category alone, and calls with no recorded type display as "Unknown" by default.
Neighborhood outlines
Fourteen neighborhoods are drawn from the City of Arlington's own Subareas and Neighborhoods GIS layer, which is what we use to classify calls by coordinates. The outlines are on by default, and the Map Layers section has a switch to turn them off.
Clicking one of the areas scopes the map and activity feed to that selection, framing the camera, sums, and activity feed to just the selected area. Dismiss the selected area by clicking outside of it on the map, or by clicking the “x” by the neighborhood’s label in the top right of the page.
Opening a pin
Click a pin, or click a row in the activity feed at the bottom of the screen, and a detailed view opens in-place of the activity feed. These details display the call type, the date and time, the area, and the hundred block of non-protected events.
Below the call details is the disposition. For a call that cleared without a report, you’ll see the Department's recorded disposition, such as Settled by Contact or Gone on Arrival. For a call that became a report, the chain runs from the call to the incident, and adds the arrest when one was recorded.
On a phone, the two buttons at the bottom of the screen open the same things: Activity for the feed, Filters for the panel.
Why a pin is never an address
Every location on Civic Informer is generalized to the hundred block. A pin reading "17200 block of Smokey Point Blvd" covers a stretch of street, not a building, and the pin sits on that stretch rather than on a door. Pins for protected incidents, i.e. domestic violence, are deliberately generalized a step further - the map will always tell you when that is the case.
Calls flagged as domestic violence or suicide-related are generalized to the neighborhood level instead of marking a block, notated as "Redacted to neighborhood". In this case, the map pin is randomized at least 200 metres from where the call actually happened to provide transparency while protecting victims. The full rule is at /methodology/sources.
The map runs a day behind
Civic Informer receives the previous day’s calls for service each morning. Our online pages, daily newsletter, and map are not real-time. For an emergency, call 911. For non-emergency dispatch, Arlington residents should call 425-407-3999.
Explore Arlington
Start at the Arlington hub for the current counts and the latest report, open the live map to see where the calls landed, browse the neighborhood profiles for a single area over time, or read the most recent daily report for the full event log. How the data is sourced and published is written out at /arlington/about.