Method & Guardrails

• Online only. This desk publishes only information already accessible online. If a figure is not published by any source, the page says so — we do not estimate it.
• Statistics come from the police agency's own published tables. We cite the exact table and period, and label the figures what they are: offenses reported to police — not arrests, not convictions, not outcomes.
• Bookings and mugshots are captured from official jail rosters only — the sheriff's or jail authority's own public roster. We never take bookings, photos or charges from commercial mugshot aggregators, and we never buy them.
• Outcomes come from court records (in Indiana, MyCase; in Ohio, the county clerk of courts). An archived booking is followed to its disposition and updated.
• Maps show only data we can stand behind. If an agency does not publish a geocoded incident feed, we say so on the page instead of drawing pins we cannot source.
• Unsolved crimes are filed only from official cold-case listings — the police agency's own cold-case page, the Indiana State Police, or the FBI. No case, name, or detail is ever invented, and nothing is taken from entertainment or aggregator sites.

Bookings captured from official rosters are retained in a permanent archive after a person leaves the roster, searchable by name, booking date, charge and cause number. Because most rosters list only current inmates, captures run on a repeated cadence so short bookings are not lost. Each entry keeps its source roster and capture timestamp, and its court disposition is added as the case moves.

Permanent means retained by default. It does not override the law or the rules below.

• Arrest is not a conviction. That notice appears on every booking entry.
• No pay-to-remove — ever. Removal and correction are free, always. Anyone who charges for removal is running a different business than ours.
• Free removal/correction on documented request for: dismissal, acquittal, expungement or sealing (Indiana Code 35-38-9; Ohio Revised Code 2953), a case never filed, or mistaken identity.
• No juveniles. No sealed or expunged records. Victim-identifying details are never published.
• Our own investigations publish no accusation without a primary record behind it, and claims are graded: PROVEN / DOCUMENTED / UNPROVEN / MISIDENTIFIED.

Wrong name, wrong charge, wrong outcome? The record gets fixed and the fix is noted. Each city desk carries its own Corrections & Removal page — start with the Fort Wayne corrections page.