Where crime and hazard data comes from

Consilium publishes three weekly reports so anyone can read a national picture without installing the app: crime, earthquakes, and chemical or hazardous-material incidents. This page is the guide to those reports. It says where the numbers come from, what “reported” means, and what the pages deliberately leave out. City and neighborhood lookup lives in the app, not on these pages.

Weekly US crime report

The weekly US crime report describes reported incidents for a Monday-to-Sunday week and compares that week with the trailing four-week average. The map is a density picture, a smoothed surface from city and region data, not a pin for each incident and not a count you can add up by county. Nothing below the state or territory is named. Alaska and Hawaii are drawn at their own scale so they are visible.

Reported-incident counts for the most recent one or two weeks are usually incomplete. Agencies finish reports on their own schedule, and later weeks can revise the picture. Category definitions also differ by source. Treat the page as a way to see where activity is concentrated, not as a lookup tool for an address. Older weeks stay in the crime report archive.

Weekly earthquake report

The weekly earthquake report uses USGS-monitored sensors. Every reported earthquake in the United States and its territories is counted, including smaller events, and the page also separates those at magnitude 2.5 or greater. The largest event is named with its magnitude, place, and time. Dots on the map are sized and colored by magnitude on a fixed scale, so one week can be compared with the next. USGS may revise a magnitude after the first publication, which is why each page carries a “data as of” time.

The state table lists how many earthquakes were reported and the largest magnitude in that state or territory. It is a catalog summary, not a prediction. Past weeks are listed in the earthquake report archive.

Weekly chemical incidents report

The weekly chemical incidents report counts notifications received by the National Response Center. These are initial, self-reported notices. A federal or state response agency has not necessarily validated or investigated them. Drills are excluded. A report is marked notable when the initial notice mentions a fire, evacuation, injury, fatality, or a transportation corridor closure. Everything else is routine. Most notices include a GPS point or a street address. A few cannot be placed on the map and are still counted in the totals.

Some weeks are quiet and some are not. A week with two reports and a week with several hundred are both published the same way, and both remain in the chemical incident archive.

What these pages are not

They are not the Consilium alert feed. The app, described on the features page, is where a boil-water notice, a local crime pattern, or a spill is tied to your city. The weekly pages are a calm public record: one H1, one week, one summary sentence, and a table. They do not rank neighborhoods, and they do not claim that a density map is a complete census. For how breaking news handles the same topics differently, see why breaking news is too slow for local safety. Health alerts that are not in these three reports, such as air quality and boil-water notices, are explained on the health and environmental alerts page.