For the last five months, you have been getting a daily newsletter that turns official police data into something you can actually read, understand, and use. That part is not going anywhere, but the name is changing.
We wanted to share why, what we have learned along the way, and where this is all going.
How This Started
We launched Bellingham Scan in late October 2025. The idea came from the same place it probably came from for a lot of you. We wanted to know what was happening in our community.
The City of Bellingham publishes daily police incident data, which is fantastic for a fundamental layer of transparency, but often leaves the bigger picture unanswered. For ourselves, we found the rows of data difficult to track over time, impossible to visualize, and lacking the insights we care about: what is our community actively dealing with?
With Bellingham Scan, we learned we weren't the only ones searching for an answer. With Civic Informer, our mission is to turn data into insights that bring residents closer to an answer — not just in Bellingham, but communities across the nation.
What the Community Taught Us
From the start, the support from Bellingham was remarkable. Residents shared it on Nextdoor, Facebook, Reddit, and even shared it with their neighbors. This growth in the community our team is grateful to call home has been awesome. Even better however, is the feedback from neighbors who made our reports a key part of their routine.
This feedback is what has and continues to drive us. For the greater part of a year we've been honing our systems to provide better editions, sharper analysis, and resources that keep residents informed.
What We've Built
What started as a daily email has become a full platform.
While subscribers can expect the same daily newsletter, we encourage you to explore the new Civic Informer platform: a civic communications ecosystem with features we couldn't have imagined when we sent that first edition. To name a few:
- Interactive incident map with filtering by date, category, and neighborhood
- Neighborhood directory and analysis
- 7-day and 30-day summary reports
- Social services and community resources directory
- Full archive of every report we have published
For a full walkthrough of everything available, see our Welcome to Civic Informer guide.
Collaborating with Bellingham PD
In February 2026, the Bellingham Police Department warmly contacted us offering their support to improve the scope and practices of our data ingesting and processing.
After several meetings and an aligned mission to enhance public communications, we signed a data sharing agreement enabling us to provide significantly more holistic information with provisioned access to CAD data, and just as importantly, the nuanced awareness of what data we don't have.
We're still the same team, an independent third party, unaffiliated with government agencies or political organizations, and are still focused on the same mission — building more informed communities.
Why Civic Informer
We built Bellingham Scan in Bellingham simply because it's the community we're personally involved with and love. As we saw more and more residents make Bellingham Scan a key part of their routine, we knew what was next — turning our mission of creating a more informed Bellingham into a mission of creating more informed communities.
Civic Informer reflects our mission and our vision: a platform that can serve communities nationwide while keeping the same principles we started with here in Bellingham.
What Is Changing
- The name. Bellingham Scan is now Civic Informer.
- The website. A full rebuild with new sections, better navigation, and features that were not possible before. The biggest additions are the live interactive incident map and neighborhood specific reporting.
- The data. Better source data from our partnership with BPD means richer, more complete analytics and communications.
What is not changing. The daily newsletter you are used to seeing. The commitment to direct, honest, straightforward reporting. The team behind it. The fact that this is free and always will be for residents.
How to Migrate
Over the next 30 days, we will be migrating all newsletter sending from bellinghamscan.com to civicinformer.com. There are three ways this can happen:
- Click the migrate link in your daily email. Each newsletter includes a one-click button to switch your subscription to civicinformer.com immediately.
- Sign up on the website. If you subscribe to Civic Informer using the same email address you use for Bellingham Scan, your subscription will automatically migrate.
- Do nothing. We will migrate all remaining Bellingham Scan subscribers within the next 30 days. You will simply notice the sender change from bellinghamscan.com to civicinformer.com — same reports, same schedule, nothing else changes.
To make sure our emails land in your inbox consistently, we recommend adding daily@civicinformer.com to your contacts or address book in your email provider.
How You Can Help
We've grown to where we are today because our community shared Bellingham Scan online, with neighbors, and actively played a role in our broader mission. Even then, we're still at the beginning of where Civic Informer will be. If you've found our analytics helpful and believe that effective communication is something every community deserves, we'd love to continue this journey together.
Here's what helps us keep going:
- Share feedback. Tell us what features you want to see, what is working, and what is not. We read every response and it shapes what gets built next.
- Share with your neighbors. If someone you know would find this useful, send it their way. Word of mouth is how we got here and it is how we keep growing.
- Share with people outside Bellingham. If you know someone in another city who wants this, have them request their city on our site. We have a waitlist and we prioritize by demand. The more people who request a city, the sooner we get there.
Thank You, Bellingham
This is our promise to keep building, getting better, and showing up every morning.
Thanks for being part of this from the start.
Evan and Levi Founders, Civic Informer