About Bellingham Reports

Where the Bellingham Data Comes From

Everything published for Bellingham comes from official government records. Police data comes from the Bellingham Police Department (BPD Activity Reports). Fire and EMS data comes from the Bellingham Fire Department, a separate agency with its own records.

Civic Informer holds a signed data sharing agreement with the Bellingham Police Department, providing structured incident data directly from the agency. A separate signed data sharing agreement with the Bellingham Fire Department is what makes the fire and EMS reporting on these pages possible. In every case we publish only what the agreement permits, and the source is the department’s own records.

We do not editorialize what we receive. How each source publishes, and how the record types relate, is documented in where the data comes from.

What We Publish for Bellingham

• Police incident reports — Offense records the department has written up and released. These are the basis of daily reports, neighborhood statistics, and the map.
• Calls for service — Dispatched police calls. A call counts activity, not a confirmed crime; many calls close with no offense at all.
• Arrests — Custody events, counted once per person taken into custody regardless of how many charges are involved.
• Fire and EMS responses — Dispatched fire and medical calls as recorded by the fire department, from structure fires to aid calls.

How the Numbers Are Defined

The Activity Index is the single five-band reading shown across Bellinghampages. 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.