Hi PH, Evan here. A year ago I kept noticing the same gap: cities collect mountains of police data, and residents have almost no real way to interact with it. The space in between gets filled by Citizen-style alerts, neighborhood Facebook drama, and the occasional press release. None of those help anyone understand what's actually happening. Meanwhile, private companies live under dashboards, KPIs, and quarterly scrutiny. Local government doesn't. That asymmetry felt wrong. So I started building the in-between: a free, ad-free daily briefing that turns a city's official records into something a person can actually read in two minutes. The first version was a scraper for Bellingham PD's HTML incident log and a hacky email I sent to myself. What's launching today is a multi-city pipeline with structured analytics, AI-drafted narratives, and a human operator who approves every edition before it ships. Departments get a partner portal to review content, push alerts, and pull branded social graphics with the day's real numbers. The biggest lesson was that the hard problems weren't technical. They were about data normalization across vendor systems, public records boundaries, presumption of innocence, and figuring out what a department will actually let go out the door. Bellingham PD trusted us first. San Francisco runs in open-data mode. More cities are queued. If you work in or around local government, civic tech, journalism, or public safety, I'd love your honest critique. Architecture, business model, the part where I'm a non-cop building a thing for cops, all of it.

Civic Informer

Building better informed communities.

Building better informed communities.