Privacy Statement

We value your desire to maintain your privacy, especially since you work for a public safety agency, be it law enforcement, fire or EMS. Therefore, we have a simple policy--we do not sell, rent, lease, give away or otherwise distribute any information that you give us to any other person or company. The only distribution of your information is to process your credit card order (if applicable), and to mail you DISPATCH Monthly or materials you ordered from our Bookstore. Otherwise, your information is stored only on our local computer (never our Internet servers) behind a firewall, at a secure location. We also take precautions to protect subscriber information on paper--we secure stored records and shred old records before recycling them.

Furthermore, we do not separately collect personal information about you, such as sex, race, age, income, occupation, etc. for any purpose. Naturally, some of this information may be apparent from your name or agency that you send us, but we don't either collect or use it for any targeted marketing purpose. We also do not track individual visits to our Web site, and collect no individual information on the identity of visitors. Our ISPs do track the number of visitors to our Web site and other general information, and we review it periodically to insure proper operation of the system.

Our News Hound e-mail newsletter is operated by Topica.com. While News Hound subscribers' e-mail addresses are stored on Topica's computers, Topica does not not send out their own e-mail messages to anyone on the list, and they do not distribute the e-mail addresses to other companies or individuals. We use your e-mail address only to send you News Hound e-mails.

By formal agreement with the operators of Internet e-mail lists, we do not publish in our printed edition the postings of list members without the permission of both the person who wrote the posting, and the person who operates the e-mail list. This ensures that e-mail list participants can feel free to express themselves. When we do publish such a e-mail posting, we credit the person who wrote it (unless they would prefer to remain anonymous) and the list on which it originally. appeared.

We have received only one complaint in 16 years about the release of personal information, and were able to trace it to another source--it wasn't us!