Overview
What Civic Informer is, and the end-to-end journey your local public safety data takes from an official record to a published statistic.
Civic Informer turns official municipal public safety records into a clear, daily picture of what is happening in your city. This reference documents exactly how that works: where the data comes from, how every incident is categorized, and how each statistic on the platform is defined and computed.
The data journey, end to end
Every number on Civic Informer can be traced back to a single official source. The path from a department's record to a published statistic has four stages:
- Sources. We ingest data exclusively from official police and fire department records, either a department's public incident feed or a formal data sharing agreement. No third-party aggregators, social media, or crowd-sourced tips.
- Processing. Each record is normalized into one consistent internal structure, geocoded to block-level precision, and assigned to a neighborhood.
- Categorization. Every incident is mapped to a category and a violent or non-violent designation using fixed, reproducible rules.
- Publication. Aggregated statistics are published daily to the web platform and the email brief, both drawn from the same pipeline run.
Trust commitments
- Source-traceable. Every record keeps its original case number, so any reader can cross-reference it against the department's own records.
- Unaltered. We never edit, editorialize, or interpolate source data. If a record was not received, it is not reported.
- Computed, not written. Every statistic and every sentence of reporting is produced by fixed, documented rules from the data itself (see Editorial standards).
- Documented. Every category, designation, and statistic on the platform is defined in this reference and computed by the rules described here. Where the method has known limits, they are disclosed in Limitations & accuracy.