How we categorize

Departments describe the same event in wildly different ways. One logs "THEFT-SHOPLIFTING," another "LARCENY 6," a third an IUCR or NIBRS code. To report consistently, Civic Informer maps every offense description onto one shared category. The mapping is fixed and reproducible: the same description always produces the same category.

Category families

Categories roll up into five families. The grouping below is the exact one the platform uses on its neighborhood pages, and the category list is read live from the classification dimension, so this reference can never list a category the product doesn't use, or omit one it does.

Each family is a plain-English bucket, not a legal definition:

• Person crimes: offenses against people: assault, robbery, sex offenses, homicide, threats and harassment.
• Property crimes: theft, burglary, vehicle theft, fraud, vandalism, arson.
• Public order & health: disorder, behavioral-health and welfare calls, narcotics, suspicious activity, missing persons.
• Mobility & community: traffic collisions, DUI, traffic enforcement.
• Administrative: assists, warrants, civil matters, compliance checks.

How classification works

Each incident is classified at the time of ingestion from its offense description. Classification is deterministic: the same description always maps to the same category, so figures are consistent and reproducible across the entire dataset. The rules read several input vocabularies, from a department's own labels to national code systems (NIBRS, FBI, IUCR) and state statutes, which is how the same category can be reached from many different record formats.

Department taxonomies

Some departments maintain their own official category system, and where we work directly with a department, we serve that department's own taxonomy on that city's pages. Bellingham is the current example: the Bellingham Police Department classifies offenses into its own set of 52 categories, and every Bellingham surface (the daily report, the map, neighborhood pages, and the newsletter) reports in BPD's categories.

The department taxonomy is seeded from the department's official offense classification and verified against the department's current list. It is applied the same way as the shared taxonomy: a fixed offense-to-category mapping, published in full in the crosswalk below.

Two rules keep this honest:

• The shared classification still runs underneath. Every incident is also classified in the shared taxonomy, so cross-city analysis stays consistent. The department taxonomy changes what is displayed for that city, not how the data is measured.
• The violent designation never moves. Violent or non-violent is decided by the shared classification rules regardless of which taxonomy a city displays, so a "violent" count means the same thing in every city.

Fire and EMS call types

Fire and EMS events are categorized separately from police incidents, using the dispatch call type. Every call type maps to one of a fixed set of fire and EMS categories (medical aid, structure fire, vehicle collision, hazardous condition, and so on) through the same kind of deterministic crosswalk used for offenses.

Dispatch systems often log call types as internal codes rather than readable labels. Where that is the case, we additionally maintain a curated dictionary that translates each raw code into a plain-English label for display. The translation is display-only: categorization and statistics run on the underlying record, and a code with no dictionary entry is shown as unknown, not guessed at.

Violent vs. non-violent

Every classification rule carries a violent or non-violent designation, applied consistently so the same offense type always receives the same one. The violent categories are marked in the families above and in the crosswalk below. The violent count and percentage appear in daily reports and trend analysis as a measure of severity, distinct from raw volume.

Our designation is anchored to, but broader than, the FBI's definition. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program defines violent crime as four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Civic Informer designates those, and additionally marks offenses involving physical harm, credible threat, or serious direct risk to persons: for example domestic violence, sex offenses, abduction, carjacking, firearm discharges, and burglary (which the FBI counts as a property crime, but which carries a direct risk of confrontation in the home).

Because the set is broader, a violent count on Civic Informer is not comparable to an FBI UCR or NIBRS violent crime total, and we do not present it as one. The exact designation for every offense is public in the crosswalk below.

The full crosswalk

These are the actual rules the pipeline applies, rendered live from the classification tables. Use the filter to look up any offense or category. The Source column shows the input vocabulary each rule reads: a department label, a call type, or a national code system (NIBRS, FBI, IUCR) or state statute.

Incident offenses

Calls for service

How dispatch call types map to categories:

The Bellingham taxonomy

The Bellingham Police Department's own category system, as served on every Bellingham page. Each row maps an offense label to the BPD category it is reported under:

Ambiguous descriptions

Our rules map known offense descriptions to categories. Unusual or ambiguous descriptions that do not map cleanly are flagged for review rather than guessed at. We add rules as new descriptions appear; until then, an unmatched record is surfaced for a person to classify, not silently mislabeled.