Good news, concerned citizens and nosy neighbors alike: Much Milwaukee police activity throughout the city can be tracked live right from your smartphone.
The best first place to answer an immediate question is the “dispatched calls for service” page on the police department’s website. It’s a log of the last 90 minutes of police calls, including time, address, nature of the call (traffic stop, battery/fight/assault, shots fired, reckless vehicle, etc.) and status of completion.
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This raw feed updates every five minutes, and you can filter by police district if you want to keep an eye on a specific area of the city. Some information, of course, remains off limits. And for calls older than 90 minutes, you’ll have to file an open records request that could take weeks or more.
If you’re looking for the bigger picture, MPD tracks major offenses in several categories (think homicide, robbery, rape, carjacking) at its data portal. The nifty tool allows you to break down data by neighborhood and offense, compare time periods and map offenses. “You can either do a citywide search or you can do a pull by your police district, a neighborhood, an aldermanic district, and it is always publicly available and it is always current data,” says Heather Hough, MPD chief of staff.
She also pointed citizens to @MilwaukeePolice on Facebook, Instagram and X, and notes that some police districts are active on the Next Door platform, where they push more local information to specific neighborhoods.
If you want a real person to answer your burning questions, MPD has a resource for that, too. The “Who Do I Contact?” page on its website directs users to a whole host of ways to get in contact with the MPD, with specific phone numbers for various scenarios. There are nonemergency numbers, a guide for when to call 911, how to report a crime online, district locations and phone numbers and even the contact for social services.
“There are just so many places where the public can get information about crime and police activity,” Hough says. “One of our priorities is transparency.”
