ABOUT THE DATA
What the records show—and what they cannot.
PDX Signal combines recent public dispatch records with official historical Portland Police data. The two sources have different coverage and should be read with care.
Today’s Pulse
The compact header counts Portland Police records in completed 15-minute periods since midnight. It compares that count with matching weekdays in 2025 through the same time. The typical full-day count is the median for those weekdays.
The busiest period is today’s highest observed rolling 30-minute window. The unusual call type and largest area difference are the categories and approximate two-mile areas furthest above their usual 2025 counts by the same time. Area names identify the nearest neighborhood center and do not represent exact boundaries.
“Good data coverage” appears only when successful feed checks cover at least 80% of today’s completed 15-minute intervals. Otherwise the header clearly labels the coverage as partial.
Recent dispatch records
The City Atom/GeoRSS feed exposes the latest 100 Portland Police and Portland Fire records. PDX Signal checks the source once a minute while its collector is online and retains observed records for seven days.
- Included fields
- Incident ID, agency, published call type, published time, updated time, public block or intersection, and coordinates.
- Record status
- The feed does not provide an explicit active, closed, cleared, or resolved field for each item.
- Publication delay
- Unknown. A successful retrieval does not prove every record is current.
- Coverage
- The source’s latest 100 records, rather than every call made during a fixed period.
Location and privacy
The interface shows the block address or intersection published by the City. Map points are rounded to a 0.005-degree cell, roughly 400–600 meters in Portland. PDX Signal omits more precise source coordinates, named people, responder movements, inferred routes, and camera feeds.
Neighborhood and radius views describe approximate service demand. They do not follow exact property boundaries and are not safety ratings.
Historical comparisons
Historical views use official Portland Police dispatched-call datasets. Fire calls are excluded from those comparisons. Live labels are matched conservatively to final historical categories, and records without the fields required for a calculation are excluded from it.
Recorded response time runs from entry into the police dispatch queue until the first officer arrival when usable timestamps are present. It does not reveal staffing, route, starting point, call complexity, or the cause of delay.
How to interpret categories and counts
Category labels are broad groupings of source call types. Counts reflect reporting, dispatch, classification, visitor activity, road traffic, and service practices. They are not adjusted for population or neighborhood size and should not be treated as the prevalence of crime or danger.
Reuse and provenance
City open-data terms describe PDDL licensing for covered datasets, with exceptions and no availability guarantee. PDX Signal preserves source identifiers and timestamps for provenance. A feed-specific license connection has not been confirmed, so reuse should preserve attribution and be reviewed against the applicable City terms.