What Is Civic Informer?
Civic Informer is a free public safety data platform. Every morning, we publish a briefing summarizing the prior day's police incident report data for Bellingham.
We're not a news outlet. We don't editorialize, investigate, or take policy positions. We process Bellingham Police Department incident report data, categorize it, visualize it, analyze trends, and present it clearly so you can understand what's happening in your city.
We're a Bellingham-built project. This is where we started, and the community here shaped every feature.
What You'll Find Here
Civic Informer is more than a daily email. Here's what's available to you right now.
Daily Briefings & Reports
Every morning, a new briefing covers the prior day's BPD incident data. The free email newsletter gives you the key numbers at a glance: top categories, busiest neighborhoods, arrest data, and AI-generated analysis.
On the website, full interactive daily reports include 9 tabs: overview, categories, violent crime, arrests, neighborhoods, hourly patterns, trends, key patterns, and the complete incident log.
Weekly & Monthly Trends
7-day and 30-day rolling summaries give you tabs for overview, neighborhoods, categories, day-by-day or week-by-week breakdowns, and hourly patterns. Single days can be noisy. These views show you what's actually changing over time.
Weekly summary · Monthly summary
Interactive Incident Map
Filter incidents by category, time of day, arrest status, neighborhood, and violence level. The map holds up to 90 days of data, and every filter combination generates a shareable URL.
Neighborhood Data
Rankings, 30-day trends, biggest movers. Find out what's happening in your part of town.
Community Resources
A directory of crisis support, mental health, housing, substance use, legal aid, and other services in Bellingham. If you or someone you know needs help, start here.
Agency Support
Bellingham PD can post alert banners directly on the site and publish blog posts here. When the department has something you should know, whether it's a safety advisory, a community event, or a policy update, you'll see it.
In the daily email, you may also see a dedicated "From BPD" section with agency messaging.
What You Can Expect From Us
- Consistent, daily data delivery. We've published over 100 editions and counting.
- Transparency about what our data shows and what it doesn't.
- A neutral utility. No editorializing, no sensationalism, no ads.
- A platform that gets better over time as we add data sources and features. Call data integration is in progress.
Why Bellingham
Bellingham is where Civic Informer started. Over the past year, this community has shaped every part of the platform, from the daily email format to the neighborhood rankings to the resources directory.
Over 1,000 Bellingham residents now receive the daily briefing. That's roughly 1 in 40 households. The 80% email open rate tells us people find this useful.
We built this because we live here and wanted our neighbors to have a clear picture of what's happening. That hasn't changed.
What's Next
This is the first of five posts introducing Civic Informer's Bellingham blog. Coming next:
- Understanding Your Daily Briefing: A Reader's Guide — what every number in your morning email means
- What Our Data Is, and What It Isn't — where the data comes from, how we process it, and what it can't tell you
- Top Bellingham Social Services — the most important local organizations for crisis support, housing, mental health, and more
- How To Use Civic Informer, Bellingham — a complete walkthrough of every feature
Subscribe to the daily briefing or check back on the Bellingham blog to follow along.