Our new police log: what's in it, where it comes from and what we're learning

Cape Ann now has one place to look up what police were called about in your town. Our police log lets you search calls by town, date, street and type, and it grows every day as departments send us their logs.

Here is what is in it, where it comes from and what we are learning so far.

Where the logs come from

Every police department in Massachusetts must keep a daily log of its calls and arrests, and state law makes that log a public record. We ask each Cape Ann department for its log and load it as it arrives.

• Rockport emails us its daily call log. The first one arrived Oct. 2 and covers Oct. 1 to 2.
• Manchester-by-the-Sea posts a weekly log on the police department's website, usually about 10 days after the week ends. We have loaded every week from July 5 through Sept. 12.
• Essex police agreed this week to add us to their press log. We will load it as soon as the first one comes in.
• Gloucester is next. We are working on getting the city's log.

When a new log comes in, it goes on the site the same day after our privacy checks. We hope to always keep it up to date, and the page shows the date range we have for each town.

What we are learning

So far the log holds 1,366 calls: 1,315 from Manchester and 51 from Rockport.

Most police work is not what people picture. In Manchester, a third of all calls, 440 of 1,315, were logged as directed patrols, when an officer is assigned to patrol a particular area. Next came citizen assists (99), motor vehicle stops (84), abandoned, false or disconnected 911 calls (74), selective enforcement (74) and lost and found property (63). Manchester police logged about 130 calls a week this summer.

In Rockport's first day of logs, more than half the calls, 28 of 51, were logged as area checks.

Arrests are rare in the logs. Manchester's 10 weeks include 8 arrests or summonses. Rockport's first day had none.

What we leave out

The log is a public record, but some of it should not be on a website. We never publish names, ages or house numbers, only the street. We hold back entire calls involving domestic violence, sexual offenses, children, mental health, overdoses and deaths, and those show only as "Call withheld for privacy." Six Manchester calls are withheld that way. We do not add to or rewrite what a department wrote, and a call in the log is not proof that anyone did anything wrong.

The full list of what we leave out is on the police log page. The arrests page also lists adult arrests for the four towns' police departments from the state's crime reporting system, with no names.

Help us keep it current

If you see something wrong in the log, email [email protected]. We will look at it the same day. How we handle removal requests is on our standards page.