Methodology & Data — CT Public Safety Data Map

Data sources (all official, all public, all free)

What	Source	Publisher	Freshness
Hartford incident points & heatmap NIBRS violent subset, geocoded	Hartford Open Data — "Police Incidents Current Year"	City of Hartford	Nightly; ~10-day publication delay
911 dispatch calls layer Priority A–B calls for service, last 30 days	Hartford Open Data — "Police Calls for Service Current Year"	City of Hartford	Nightly; ~10-day publication delay
Beacon Falls + Southington crime Annual agency-level NIBRS reports; sexual offenses excluded from the violent-focus count	CT DESPP — Crime Overview by Town	Connecticut DESPP Crimes Analysis Unit	Annual archive; latest bundled snapshot is labeled by report year
Beacon Falls dispatch source Periodic aggregate calls-for-service reports; not a live CAD feed	Beacon Falls department packets · Police report archive · NWCTPS coverage	Town police / regional PSAP operator	Periodic; no public machine-readable event feed located
Beacon Falls public-safety context Annual police/fire/EMS totals and site-specific traffic-safety history	FY27 adopted budget metrics · South Main traffic plan	Town of Beacon Falls / CT DOT	FY24/FY25 actuals; traffic history is site-specific
Southington dispatch source CAD-backed communications center; no public live event feed	Southington Police Communications / CAD · Records / FOI requests	Town of Southington / Police Department	CAD exists; no public machine-readable event feed located
Southington traffic stops Calendar-year traffic-stop counts; not crime or dispatch data	CTData 2024 analysis · Raw data by department	CTData / UConn IMRP repository	2019–2024 series
Release tracker Statewide sentenced custody file	Sentenced Inmates in Correctional Facilities	CT Department of Correction via data.ct.gov	Nightly upload
Town boundaries	Connecticut Town Index	CT Department of Energy & Environmental Protection	Static reference layer

The site fetches Hartford's two nightly feeds directly from your browser when you open it. If that fails (offline demo, blocked network), it falls back to bundled snapshots generated by scripts/update_data.py. The Beacon Falls/Southington annual agency reports are bundled snapshots. Additional public-safety context is bundled separately: Beacon Falls service metrics and traffic-safety history, plus Southington traffic-stop counts and official CAD/records links. None of those context sources is a live local dispatch map layer.

Definitions & scope decisions

"Violent crime" here means: murder & non-negligent manslaughter, manslaughter, kidnapping/abduction, robbery, and aggravated assault — the FBI NIBRS Group A offenses commonly counted as violent, minus sexual-assault offenses, which are excluded from this project by design. For incidents we use NIBRS codes 09A, 09B, 09C, 100, 120, 13A.

For the release tracker, the DOC's free-text offense field is matched to: homicide/manslaughter statutes, robbery/carjacking, kidnapping & unlawful restraint 1st, home invasion, assault 1st/2nd, strangulation, terroristic threat 1st. Sexual offenses, simple assault 3rd, property and drug offenses are excluded. People with an ICE detainer are excluded from release countdowns because they transfer to federal custody rather than releasing to the public.

No sex-offender content. This project deliberately excludes sexual-assault offense categories and does not link to or mirror any sex-offender registry. If you need that information, use the DESPP registry directly.

Known limitations (read before relying on anything)

Coverage is not statewide. Hartford is the only live, geocoded incident-level map feed here. Beacon Falls and Southington have annual DESPP agency reports plus separate context data in the Town Explorer; the release tracker is statewide.
Publication delay. Hartford releases incidents on roughly a 10-day lag; this is near-real-time by government-data standards, but it is never a live police scanner. Beacon Falls dispatch sources are periodic/aggregate. Southington confirms a CAD-backed communications center, but does not expose a public machine-readable event feed; neither town is displayed as live call points.
Dispatch ≠ crime. A calls-for-service entry is an initial request or response signal, not a confirmed crime, charge, arrest, or court finding. Crime counts come from separate annual NIBRS reports.
Scanner aggregators are different. Services such as CrimeRadar listen to publicly accessible radio, then generate AI summaries on a short refresh cycle. Those alerts are unconfirmed and are not imported into this official-source-only site; importing them would require permission for the feed and a continuously running audio/transcription pipeline.
Reported ≠ occurred ≠ proven. Incident data reflects reported events as classified by police; charges can be reduced or dismissed.
End dates move. Sentence end dates in the DOC file are projections that the state itself warns may change. The file also drops people immediately upon release, so "recently released" lists are partial.
Anonymized IDs only. We display exactly what the state publishes (anonymous identifiers) and add no names, photos, addresses of individuals, risk scores, or predictions — ever.
Heat maps show report density. Concentrations reflect reporting patterns and geocoding quality as much as underlying activity. Do not read them as safety ratings of any neighborhood.

How updates work

You don't have to do anything. Both feeds load live into visitors' browsers from the official endpoints each visit. The bundled snapshots exist only as offline fallbacks.

To refresh snapshots: run python scripts/update_data.py locally whenever you like (weekly is plenty) and commit the changed files in data/. It runs once, politely, with no API keys.

Hosting stays free: deploy the folder to Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, or Netlify's free tier. Full steps in README.md. There is no server, no database, and no cost at any step.

Beacon Falls + Southington: the Town Explorer shows annual CT DESPP NIBRS agency reports (kept separate when both a municipal and CSP report exist), verified public-safety context, and official dispatch/report links. No public live, machine-readable CAD event feed was located for either town, so the site does not invent a real-time layer from scanner audio or third-party summaries.

Privacy & anonymity

For visitors:

No cookies, no analytics, no accounts, no forms, no advertising, no fingerprinting — nothing about you is collected, stored, or sold, by this site.
There is no server for this site. It is a set of static files; your own browser fetches the public data directly from the official endpoints (data.ct.gov, Hartford's open-data service). The site operator never sees your requests and keeps no logs.
Like any web page that embeds a map, basemap tiles are served by third parties (CARTO / OpenStreetMap), whose servers technically see your IP address when delivering tile images. That is the same as loading any image from any website; this site adds nothing to it.
The optional "install as app" (PWA) support uses a service worker purely to cache this site's own files on your device for offline use. It contains no tracking code.

For the operator: free-hosting subdomains (*.pages.dev, *.github.io) carry no WHOIS identity. Use a pseudonymous email for hosting accounts if you prefer. Never submit false registrant data to a registrar (that violates ICANN rules and risks losing the domain) — use the registrar's free WHOIS privacy instead if you ever add a custom domain.

Legal posture, plainly

This site re-displays public government records with attribution and links to the originals — the same posture as a news site quoting a police blotter. To keep exposure minimal: