City Watch

What three Massachusetts cities reported to 311 on their latest full day of data that was unusual for that day of the week, measured against each category’s own recent history.

1category ran well above normal on Saturday, October 31.

Boston logged 14 requests under Illegal Graffiti on Saturday, about 2.8 times its usual level for the day. Cambridge and Somerville ran normally.

Above normal

A category is listed when it is at least 1.8× its own same-weekday average for the previous four weeks, with a Poisson z of 2.5 or more to rule out small-number noise. Ranked by how far from normal, not by raw volume.

Also moving

Below the bar, but worth a look

These did not clear both thresholds. Most are high-volume categories where a statistically real rise is still a small relative change.

By city

The last 28 days

Each city has its own report, covering ninety days of volume, what moved on the latest day and the caveats specific to that feed.

Data freshness

Where each feed stands

Shown because these pipelines are new. If one stalls, a quiet day and a broken feed look identical unless the lag is on the page.

Boston
latest record 2026-10-31 23:57
last loaded 2026-11-01 13:36
317,873 rows · loaded 5h ago
Cambridge
latest record 2026-10-29 00:04
last loaded 2026-10-29 14:11
156,408 rows · loaded 77h ago
Somerville
latest record 2026-10-30 22:25
last loaded 2026-10-31 13:40
1,235,429 rows · loaded 29h ago

Sources: Boston via the Open311 GeoReport v2 API, Cambridge via the Commonwealth Connect dataset on the city’s Socrata portal, Somerville via its 311 dataset on data.somervillema.gov. Collected into BigQuery by Ingest and rebuilt daily.

Somerville’s feed is a contact-centre log rather than a service-request log, so informational calls are excluded here to keep the three cities counting comparable things. Boston publishes no closure timestamp, and Cambridge’s terminal status is Archived rather than Closed. None of the three is a like-for-like match for the others, and the per-category baselines used here never compare one city to another.

Page generated 2026-11-01 18:58 UTC.