Civic Informer is now in Arlington, Washington

We've partnered with Arlington Police Department to give the community a clearer view of local police activity, with daily reports, an interactive map and a free morning email.

Since our September 9 launch, Arlington residents have been able to open Civic Informer and explore the previous day's calls, see where officers responded and follow activity in their neighborhoods. The Arlington Daily Brief brings that reporting straight to subscribers' inboxes each morning.

We built Civic Informer around questions we share as residents: What happened nearby? What does the department respond to? How can I keep up? Our Arlington partnership puts a regular, accessible source of information behind those questions.

From department records to your morning briefing

Arlington Police Department supplies its calls-for-service records through an automated daily export. We organize those records into public reports and maps, then send the Daily Brief at its scheduled time of 9 a.m. Pacific.

You can start with the daily report archive, open the incident map, or explore activity by neighborhood. Whether you're interested in Smokey Point, Old Town or the city as a whole, the summary gives you a place to start and the details give you somewhere to go next.

That includes the everyday work of policing: traffic enforcement, welfare checks, assistance to other agencies and other calls for service. A call doesn't necessarily mean a crime occurred. Showing that range helps make the department's work easier to understand.

Arlington is finding its way to the reporting

The City of Arlington shared the launch, and The Daily Herald covered our partnership, connecting the service to the questions people ask when police respond nearby.

We're encouraged by what has followed. By November 2, the Daily Brief had 241 active subscribers. Between our September 9 launch and November 1, Arlington's pages recorded 1,943 website users and more than 9,000 page views. The map was the most-viewed page.

Email became our largest source of Arlington website traffic in October, accounting for about 45% of sessions. For us, that's a particularly useful early sign: the morning briefing is bringing readers back to explore the reporting.

A public resource that keeps growing

Our work with Arlington continues with each day's report. Every update adds another day of local activity to explore, and every briefing makes that information easier to follow regularly.

We're glad to be working with Arlington Police Department to make its records more useful to the community. To everyone who has subscribed, explored the map or shared the site with a neighbor: thank you for helping introduce Civic Informer to Arlington.

Explore Civic Informer Arlington and subscribe to the free Daily Brief.

Interested in bringing this kind of reporting to your community? See how we work with law enforcement agencies.