How Beat by Beat works

Beat by Beat is an independent, free viewer for the weekly crime reports local police departments already publish. Right now it covers the Savannah Police Department and the Chatham County Police Department. Both post their weekly numbers as PDFs; we reformat those same numbers into something you can read on a phone — by beat, precinct, and offense category, with 28-day and year-to-date views — without downloading a PDF. We don’t add to the numbers or interpret them for you; we organize what’s already public.

No. Beat by Beat is an independent project of The Ladnar Group. It isn’t affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the Savannah Police Department, the Chatham County Police Department, the City of Savannah, or Chatham County. Everything here is a reformatting of reports those agencies publish themselves. If a number here ever looks off, the source report is the authority — and we’d want to hear about it at info@beat-by-beat.org.

A beat is a patrol area a police department draws for its own operations — not a neighbourhood boundary. One beat usually spans several neighbourhoods, and a single neighbourhood can sit across more than one beat. So “my beat” is a policing unit that happens to include where you live; it isn’t a label on your street or your neighbourhood.

Open the Savannah or Chatham page and use the address lookup. Type an address and it tells you which beat — and, for Chatham, which precinct — it falls in, then shows that area’s figures. The lookup runs against a public county address service; the result can be saved on your own device so the page remembers it, but it isn’t sent to us or stored on our server.

Because beats aren’t the same size or character, so raw counts don’t compare like with like. Savannah’s beat 26 usually leads on volume partly because it’s the Historic District — heavy commercial activity and a lot of visitors — while a sparsely developed beat like 47 sits low for the opposite reason. Ranking beats by raw totals, with no population or activity denominator, invites a conclusion the numbers can’t support (“beat 26 is the worst neighbourhood in Savannah”). We show each beat’s own figures over time rather than a league table, for exactly this reason.

The Chatham County Police Department publishes its weekly statistics for the whole unincorporated county, not broken out by beat. So every count on the Chatham page is county-wide. The address lookup still tells you your beat, your precinct, and who to call — but a per-beat statistical breakdown depends on CCPD publishing one, which we’ve asked about. If that changes, we’ll add it.

Because they’re preliminary. These are early figures pulled from records still under review, and the departments footnote them as subject to change. A count for a given week can be revised up or down in a later report as cases are reclassified or added. We keep the department’s own revisions rather than freezing the first number we saw, and we don’t state anything with more certainty than the source does.

Most beat-level counts are small — often just a handful of incidents in a category in any given week. When the baseline is that low, one or two extra incidents can look like a big percentage swing while meaning almost nothing. That week-to-week movement is mostly noise. The 28-day and year-to-date columns smooth it out, which is why we lean on them — and why you should too.

The categories are Part I offenses under the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) criteria — the standard violent and property categories departments report on a national basis. They aren’t the same as Georgia criminal-code sections, so a count here won’t line up one-to-one with a specific charge you might read elsewhere. It’s the department’s own reporting framework, kept as-is.

Savannah the SPD CompStat reports posted in the City of Savannah’s online archive. Chatham the CCPD Weekly Crime Statistics PDFs on the county police site. Every page links back to its source so you can open the original. We read what the departments publish; we don’t collect anything ourselves.

Every figure on the site traces to a specific source PDF, and we check our reading against the totals the department prints in that same document — the category counts have to add up to the printed violent, property, and overall Part I totals before we’ll show them. Where a number can’t be reconciled against those printed totals, we flag it rather than quietly ship it. The source panel on each page shows that reconciliation status.

Anything below the aggregate level. Some source reports include an appendix of individual incidents with street addresses and apartment numbers; we never ingest, display, or build features on that. Beat-level and county-level aggregates only — no addresses, no names, no incident-level detail. That’s a firm line, not a current limitation.

Weekly, following each department’s own publishing schedule. When a new report goes up and we’ve processed and checked it, the site updates to match.

Yes. These are public crime figures — facts the departments publish — and you’re welcome to share or cite them. If you do, a link back to the source (or to the page here) helps whoever you’re sharing with check the original for themselves.

No accounts, no personal profiles, nothing tied to you by name. We keep basic, anonymous visit counts — roughly, which pages get used and how often — so we know the site is worth maintaining. That’s the extent of it. We don’t collect email addresses or ask you to sign up for anything.