About CivicDial

CivicDial answers one narrow question as quickly as possible: what number do I call when it is not an emergency?

Every US city and county publishes a non-emergency line somewhere — on a police department contact page, buried in a PDF, or three clicks into a records division. When something has already happened and nobody is in danger, people reach for a search engine and land on scraped listings that are years out of date. Dialling a dead number, or dialling 911 because the alternative was not findable, both waste the same dispatcher's time.

What this site is

A directory built from two kinds of source, and nothing else:

• The agency's own website. For the largest cities and for every county with a sheriff's office, an automated crawler reads the department's official pages and copies the number that the department itself labels “non-emergency”. The page it was read from and the date it was read are both shown.
• Federal law-enforcement registries. Where no labelled non-emergency number could be found, the department's main line from the registry is shown instead — clearly marked as a main line, never relabelled.

What this site is not

It is not a government service, and it is not affiliated with any police department, sheriff's office, or 911 centre. It does not take reports, dispatch anyone, or pass messages to an agency. It cannot help with an emergency.

It is also not a copy of another directory. Numbers are never taken from commercial listing sites, social media pages, or crowd-sourced databases, because those are exactly the sources that go stale without anyone noticing.

Corrections

Every city and county page has a Report a wrong number form. Corrections go straight into the review queue with the page they came from. If you work for an agency and want a listing changed, that form is the fastest route — see Contact.

How the data is gathered and re-checked is described in detail on the Methodology page.