What this reads, and what it refuses.
Transparency is owed by power; privacy is owed to people. This module publishes what agencies did, and protects who it happened to — including people who never signed up here and have no way to object.
How we did here, last 30 days
Every source we read here
No agency feed is configured for this community. Nothing on the board comes from a police or fire department here.
What this is not
Not scanner audio, and not an AI summary of radio traffic. Every incident is a record an agency published itself, or a neighbor report a moderator approved by hand.
Publishes without a person: official.
Never publishes without a person: report, derived.
Removed from every incident, always
These run on every item from every source before it is stored — not before it is shown. There is no setting that turns them off.
- Race-and-sex dispatch codes such as w/m or b/f, and everything after them.[description withheld]
- Spelled-out descriptions of a person's race and sex.[description withheld]
- A race word attached to any word for a person.[description withheld]
- Physical build.[description withheld]
- Clothing — what somebody was wearing.[description withheld]
- Anything the dispatcher labeled a license plate.[plate withheld]
- Bare plate-shaped strings.[plate withheld]
- Dates of birth.[withheld]
- Social security numbers.[withheld]
- Telephone numbers.[phone withheld]
- Email addresses.[email withheld]
- The name of a caller, victim or suspect.[name withheld]
Street numbers are rounded down to the hundred block before storage. A dispatch address is often a victim's home.
Calls this will not carry at all
Refused on principle
- Reports that a person seemed out of place, however phrased or misspelt. Unverified by nature, and the most racially loaded category in policing. (A suspicious PACKAGE or FIRE is still carried.)
- The dispatch shorthand for the same thing.
- Abbreviated suspicious-person codes such as SUSPER.
- A caller's interpretation of someone's presence, not an act.
- Somebody being somewhere is not an incident.
- Police stopping someone who has not been accused of anything. Publishing it publishes that a person was stopped.
Left out as noise
Not wrong to publish — just not incidents, and they bury the ones that are.
- An officer patrolling. Nothing happened.
- Movement between stations.
- Staffing, not an event.
- The agency has flagged it as a bookkeeping entry.
- A call logged as advice given; no incident.
- LAPD code for a unit being on scene. 1.8M of them in our sample.
- Internal radio traffic.
- Court administration.
- Paperwork on an earlier call.
- A misdial or dropped line.
- A dropped mobile call.
- Not a real event.
- Parking.
- A scheduled meeting, not an incident.
- A transport leg of a call already counted.
- A officer-initiated check of an area. Nothing reported.
- Problem-oriented policing activity, not a call for service.
- A 311 service request — potholes and bins, not incidents.
- Placeholder and back-office entries with no incident behind them.
- Custody logistics.
What is kept, and for how long
- Who was told what is kept only as long as the daily alert cap needs it, then deleted.45 days
- The original feed row is filtered before storage: fields naming a person are dropped and the rest is redacted like anything else.
- Your home pin is rounded to about a kilometer before it is stored, and you can delete your settings entirely from The Squelch.
Nothing reaches anybody who has not asked. There is no default subscription and no administrator action that switches a town on.
This page is generated from the code that runs the module, not written alongside it. If a rule above changes, this changes with it. Your settings.