Editorial policy

This is the page I would want to read before trusting anyone with what is happening near my house. It is also the set of rules the pipeline enforces, not a statement of good intentions. Where a rule can be enforced in code, it is.

A person publishes everything

Software helps me sort and draft. It does not publish. Every incident on IndyWatch was read by a human being who decided it was accurate enough and useful enough to send you. When the classifier is unsure, or when the category is one of the serious ones, the draft waits for a person no matter how confident the model claims to be. There is no path in this system that puts a machine's judgment in front of you unreviewed.

What I will not print

No suspect names, no plate numbers, no home addresses, and no personally identifying detail until charges are filed and public. Early scanner traffic and early reporting are wrong often enough that naming someone in the first hour is how innocent people get hurt. I would rather be slower and right.

I will not print the live location of a victim or a witness, ever, at any point.

Active scenes get less detail, on purpose

For an incident still unfolding, a SWAT response, a barricaded suspect, an active shooter call, you get the headline and the neighborhood and nothing more until the scene clears. Not the staging area, not the approach, not the tactical picture. Broadcasting that to everyone with a phone endangers the people working the scene and the people who live there. The full write-up comes after, and it is worth waiting for.

Every incident shows its work

Each incident page lists the sources it was built from, with links, so you can check me. If an audio archive clip informed a story, Broadcastify is named directly on that story. Audio provided by Broadcastify.

Corrections stay visible

When I get something wrong I correct it at the top of the page, and it stays at the top for a full day so that the people who read the wrong version have a real chance of seeing the right one. Quiet edits are how outlets lose readers who were paying attention.

Anyone can flag an incident. If something turns out to be wrong enough to pull, the retraction stays on the incident page permanently rather than the page disappearing. A deleted page is not a correction, it is a cover-up.

What IndyWatch is not

It is not a place to report crime. Call 911. It is not a scanner feed, it does not stream audio, and it does not identify people by face or plate. Those features are why other services in this space keep ending up in the news for the wrong reasons, and I am not building them.