Methodology

This page describes exactly where every figure on the site comes from, how it is checked, and what the labels on each number mean. If something here does not match what you see on a page, the page is wrong — please report it.

Where the geography comes from

States, counties, and incorporated places are taken from the US Census Bureau TIGERweb geographic services (2020 Census vintage), including the official FIPS codes, legal names, and population counts used to order pages by size. Nothing about a place's name, population, or county assignment is guessed.

Where the agencies come from

The law-enforcement registry is the Local Law Enforcement Locations dataset, which descends from the Bureau of Justice Statistics Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies. It supplies each agency's legal name, type (municipal police, sheriff's office, and so on), street address, main published phone number, county, and sworn-officer count. Agency identifiers (ORI codes) are matched in from the FBI Crime Data Explorer agency API where a confident name-and-state match exists.

How a non-emergency number is confirmed

A number is only labelled Confirmed on the official site when all of the following held at the time of the check:

1. The page was served from a domain that belongs to that locality — a .gov domain assigned to it in the federal .gov domain registry published by CISA, a state municipal .us domain, the official website recorded for the place in Wikidata, or the department's own site linked from one of those with explicit department wording.
2. The page named the locality or its department, so a number cannot be picked up from a neighbouring city's page on a shared county website.
3. The number appeared in the same block of text as the words “non-emergency”, and was not a fax, TTY, or Spanish-language line.

The URL that the number was read from and the date it was read are printed next to it. Numbers are never copied from commercial directories, aggregators, social media, or user submissions.

What the other labels mean

Where no number on the agency's own site carried the words “non-emergency”, the page falls back — in this order — to the next best thing it can honestly describe:

1. Dispatch line — a number the agency's own site publishes for its dispatch or communications centre. In most agencies that centre takes routine calls, but the page did not use the words “non-emergency”, so it is labelled for what it is.
2. Main line — the department's main or business line as published on its own website.
3. Registry main line — the agency's main published number from the federal law-enforcement registry, used only when the agency's own site could not be read.

Each of these may ring a front desk that closes in the evening, which is why the label and the source URL are shown rather than hidden. Every such page links to the department's official site so the right number can be confirmed in one click. A number is never invented, inferred from a neighbouring city, or carried over from another agency.

311, 211, and other city services

A 311 service is only shown for a locality when its own official pages describe one. 211 is a nationwide health-and-human-services line operated by local United Way and partner organisations, and is listed as a general resource rather than as a locality-specific number. Links for filing a police report online, obtaining a crash or incident report copy, impound and towed-vehicle enquiries, and animal control are harvested from the agency's own site during the same pass, and are only shown when such a page was actually found.

How often this is re-checked

A scheduled job re-requests every stored source URL on a rolling monthly cycle. When a source URL stops responding, or starts returning an error, the record is flagged as stale and queued for a fresh crawl rather than silently kept. The check date shown on a page is the date that page's number was last read from the source, not the date the page was generated.

Known limits

• Some large cities publish their non-emergency number only inside an interactive widget or an image, where no text crawler can read it. Those cities fall back to the main line with the label above.
• Some departments route all non-emergency contact through 311 and publish no separate ten-digit number.
• Small places are often policed by a county sheriff or a neighbouring department rather than their own agency. Where a place has no agency of its own, no page is created for it — an empty page would be worse than none.
• Populations are 2020 Census counts and are used for ordering and context, not as current estimates.

Current coverage