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 San Francisco.
We're not a news outlet. We don't editorialize, investigate, or take policy positions. We process San Francisco Police Department incident report data published through DataSF, categorize it, visualize it, analyze trends, and present it clearly so you can understand what's happening in your city.
San Francisco is the second city Civic Informer serves. We're launching here now, and we're building with the same care that shaped the original platform.
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 SFPD 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. Because SFPD records can include multiple offenses per incident, each entry in the log shows the full list of offenses attached to that call.
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. All 41 SF analysis neighborhoods are covered, plus a separate bucket for incidents reported without exact coordinates.
Neighborhood Data
Rankings, 30-day trends, biggest movers. Find out what's happening from the Mission to the Marina, the Tenderloin to the Outer Sunset.
Community Resources
A directory of crisis support, mental health, housing, substance use, legal aid, and other services in San Francisco. If you or someone you know needs help, start here.
Agency Support
Civic Informer is built to give public-safety agencies a direct channel to the communities they serve. SFPD and other San Francisco agencies can, if they choose to participate, post alert banners on the site, publish blog posts, and include agency messaging in the daily email.
This capability is available today. Whether and how it's used in San Francisco is up to the agencies themselves.
What You Can Expect From Us
- Consistent, daily data delivery, published every morning.
- 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. We'll expand coverage as new DataSF datasets come online.
Why San Francisco
San Francisco is the largest city Civic Informer now serves, and it's a natural fit. The city's open-data program, DataSF, is one of the most mature and transparent in the country. SFPD publishes incident report data there daily, going back to 2018, which means we can build rich historical context into every briefing from day one.
San Francisco is also one of the most neighborhood-defined cities in the United States. What happens in North Beach is not what happens in the Bayview, and city-wide totals alone rarely tell the whole story. Civic Informer is built around that reality, with every report breaking data down across all 41 analysis neighborhoods.
We've loaded a full year of SFPD incident history to launch with, so the first briefing you read already sits on top of real context.
What's Next
This is the first of three posts introducing Civic Informer's San Francisco blog. Coming next:
- 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
- How To Use Civic Informer, San Francisco — a complete walkthrough of every feature
Subscribe to the daily briefing or check back on the San Francisco blog to follow along.