CitizenWatch

What it is

CitizenWatch is a free, real-time civic dashboard for Tucson, Arizona and the surrounding Pima County. It pulls real-time and historical public-safety and civic data into one place, so you can see what is happening across the region without checking a dozen separate sources.

The dashboard combines live police and fire scanner transcription, court hearings, traffic cameras, crime analytics, local news, government meeting agendas, and more. Some of it is live and updating constantly. Some of it is historical, including crime analytics covering more than 480,000 reported incidents since 2021.

CitizenWatch is independently operated. It is not affiliated with the City of Tucson, Pima County, the Tucson Police Department, or any government agency. It is a passive observer of public data and public broadcasts. It adds collection, transcription, classification, and search on top of information that is already public. It is not a dispatch service. For emergencies, call 911.

The dashboard and the daily digest email are free, and no account is required to browse.

Who it's for

• Tucson and Pima County residents: a single view of scanner activity, crime trends, traffic, and civic news near them.
• Journalists and researchers: searchable transcripts, court filings, and crime analytics spanning hundreds of thousands of incidents since 2021.
• Neighborhood and community groups: a way to track 311 reports, permits, and overnight public-safety activity in their area.
• Civic-minded locals: agendas from Tucson City Council and the Pima County Board of Supervisors, plus an officials lookup.
• Commuters: live traffic cameras and weather alerts across the region.

How it works

The scanner pipeline is the core of the system, and it runs fully on local hardware. There are no cloud APIs and no per-request billing.

1. CitizenWatch ingests six Broadcastify scanner feeds: Tucson PD/Fire Citywide, Tucson Regional, Tucson Fire, Oro Valley/Pima County Sheriff, Pinal County, and Green Valley.
2. Each 10-second audio chunk is transcribed by two independent speech-recognition models, Parakeet TDT and Whisper large-v3, running in parallel.
3. Alarm words like "fatality", "shots fired", and "homicide" must appear in both transcripts to survive into the published record. This eliminates the most common single-model transcription hallucinations.
4. Every AI-generated incident headline is validated against the cited transcript before publication. Claims that do not match the transcript are dropped, and the card renders as a neutral "Incident" label with the raw audio clips attached.

Alongside the scanner, CitizenWatch aggregates court hearings with AI-extracted defendant information, traffic cameras, 311 reports, permits, crime data, news, flights, weather, and meeting agendas into the same dashboard.

Key features

• Live scanner transcription Six Broadcastify feeds across Tucson and Pima County, transcribed in real time.
• Dual-model verification Two independent models must agree before alarm words and headlines are published.
• Courts and defendants Live Pima County Justice Court hearings with AI-extracted defendant information.
• Crime analytics Maps, trends, and scorecards built on over 480,000 reported incidents since 2021.
• Traffic cameras More than 50 ADOT and City of Tucson cameras in one view.
• Government meetings Agendas from Tucson City Council and the Pima County Board of Supervisors, plus a "Your Officials" lookup.
• Civic reports and permits SeeClickFix 311 reports and building permits for the area.
• Local news feed Coverage pulled from KGUN 9, KJZZ, KOLD 13, KVOA, and the Arizona Daily Star.
• More tools Flight tracking, National Weather Service alerts, searchable transcripts, an ESA tracker, a crime feed, projects, and a blog.
• Free daily digest One email each morning at 6 AM MST with overnight scanner activity, court filings, press releases, and local news near you.

Use cases

• Check overnight scanner activity, court filings, and press releases in one morning email instead of monitoring feeds all night.
• Research crime trends in a neighborhood across hundreds of thousands of incidents reported since 2021.
• Follow a Pima County Justice Court hearing and see AI-extracted defendant information.
• Watch live traffic conditions through 50-plus regional cameras before a commute.
• Review upcoming Tucson City Council or Pima County Board of Supervisors agendas and look up your officials.

Good to know

• Coverage: Tucson, Arizona and surrounding Pima County, with scanner feeds reaching Oro Valley, Pinal County, and Green Valley.
• Pricing: the dashboard and the daily digest email are free. No account is required to browse.
• Data sources: City of Tucson Open Data, Broadcastify, and ADOT AZ511, among others.
• Processing: scanner transcription runs on local hardware, with no cloud APIs and no per-request billing.
• Independence: independently operated and not affiliated with the City of Tucson, Pima County, the Tucson Police Department, or any government agency.
• Not a dispatch service: CitizenWatch is a passive observer of public data and public broadcasts. For emergencies, call 911.
• Transparency: a Methodology page and an FAQ explain how the data is collected and processed.