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How scores update

Scores refresh monthly

BaseScore is recalculated and published once a month, usually in the first week. Between refreshes the score for a location does not move. See Why BaseScore changes for what drives a change when it does.

What you see in the platform is always the current score. The platform does not hold historical BaseScores, so you cannot look back at what a location scored earlier in the year.

Why BaseScore changes

BaseScore is not a live crime counter. It is a modeled score built from a full year of data and scored relative to other locations in the same country. It does not recalculate when new incidents appear on the map, and the same inputs always produce the same score.

That means a change from one month to the next is not a reading of last month's crime. Scores move for two reasons.

The monthly refresh: small moves

Each refresh moves the year-long window forward. Because every score is relative to the rest of the country, a shift in a handful of other locations can move scores everywhere by a small amount, including at sites where nothing changed.

Expect these moves to be a few points at most. Treat them as normal variation, not a signal about conditions at your location.

New data and coverage: larger moves

When Base Operations adds new data sources or expands coverage, scores can move more noticeably. This is where meaningful score changes come from. Your Customer Success Manager will tell you when a release is likely to affect your locations.

Where to look for what is happening on the ground

To understand activity at a site, use the events, trends and threat breakdown in the analytic panel. BaseScore is the stable baseline for comparing locations, and the events and trends show what is changing.

Setting thresholds on score changes

If your team acts on score changes, set thresholds that ignore small moves of a few points. A larger move is a prompt to check whether new data or coverage was added, then look at the events and trends for that location.

What does not move a score

Changing the date range. This is the most common misunderstanding. BaseScore is fixed at the monthly refresh — adjusting the date filter changes the events and trends you are looking at, but it does not recalculate the score.

Changing the radius or filters — with one exception. Turning event categories on or off does change the score, because the score is aggregated across the categories you have selected. That is a change to what you asked for, not a change to the underlying data.

Tracking scores over time

If you need to follow how a location's score moves across months or quarters, the practical approach today is the API — pull BaseScore for your locations on a monthly or quarterly cadence and keep the series on your side. That is what most organizations tracking scores currently do.

Native change tracking is on the roadmap. See Integrations, and talk to your Customer Success Manager about setting it up.

If a score looks wrong

Ask us. If a score does not match what you know about a location, or has moved in a way you cannot explain, that is worth raising rather than working around:

  • support@baseoperations.com, or the Report an issue button in the platform
  • Your Customer Success Manager, for anything that needs interpretation or affects a deliverable

Include the location and what you expected to see. Ground-truth conflicts are genuinely useful to us — a score a team quietly distrusts is a score that stops getting used.