This presentation is password protected.
This presentation is password protected.
Turning public police data into daily community intelligence, built on BPD's transparency, for Bellingham residents.
In six months, Bellingham Scan has grown from a side project into the most-read daily source of local police activity, powered entirely by BPD's public incident feed.
We published a comprehensive analysis of the full year's police activity. 19,898 incidents across 25 neighborhoods, with temporal patterns, arrest data, and community insights.
Read the full report at bellinghamscan.com/reports/2025This is what 900+ subscribers received this morning. Every report is generated from BPD's public feed, enriched with analytics, and delivered before most residents finish their first cup of coffee.
BPD publishes five simple string fields per incident. Our pipeline cleans, geocodes, categorizes, and indexes every record, turning raw transparency into actionable intelligence.
From each day's incidents, our pipeline computes over 80 analytics across 11 time windows. Click any group below to see the full breakdown.
To improve the accuracy of our reporting, we'd love insight on a few patterns we've identified in the 2025 incident data. Understanding these would directly improve the quality of information residents receive.
Bellingham Scan is the proof-of-concept for a civic technology framework deployable in any city with accessible police data. BPD's data quality is what makes Bellingham an exceptional pilot.
The pipeline, analytics engine, and reporting format are all designed to be configured for a new city, not rebuilt from scratch.
Most departments outside major cities publish data that's too delayed, too vague, or not at all. BPD's feed is a model of what accessible public data can enable.
A handful of regional departments have reporting practices that would allow independent deployment. A broader rollout requires the kind of data access BPD exemplifies.
Every "Scan" instance delivers the same value proposition: converting passive government transparency into active community communication.
We believe the strongest civic tools emerge from collaboration. Here's what a partnership could look like, built on mutual benefit, not one-sided extraction.
| Bellingham Scan Can Provide | BPD Could Provide |
|---|---|
| Documentation and endpoint access to our enriched incident data model | Endpoint access to incident reports |
| Documentation on our reporting schema and category mappings | Internal documentation on relevant reporting practices |
| Automated data inconsistency and anomaly alerts | Advisory voice, a perspective from the city's side as we navigate expansion and ensure this tool stays true to its civic mission |
| A direct channel of community communication. Residents are already engaged and reading. | Official partnership or endorsement; permission for Bellingham Scan to reference a BPD relationship |
For residents, and for departments alike.