The following feed description guidelines are used when approving new feeds or making description changes for providers:

• Don’t prefix feed names with “City of”, "Town of" or “County of”.

• Only include “City” or “Town” in a description if it’s part of a city’s official name (such as “Daly City”) or when a city and the county it’s contained in have the same name (for example, this would apply for the city of San Mateo which is in San Mateo County).

• A description like “San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office” should be changed to “San Mateo County Sheriff” (replace “Sheriff’s Office” with just “Sheriff”).

• “Police Department” or “Fire Department” should be changed to just “Police” or just “Fire”.

• In most cases, descriptions should not contain abbreviations (such as PD, FD, PS, etc).  Exceptions would be MHz, ARES, EMS, USFS, and similar.

• State names should not be included in descriptions except for feeds which contain state agencies or when two cities, with the same name, exist on two sides of a state line (such as Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas).

• A description should contain "Public Safety" or "Emergency Services" (such as "Springfield County Public Safety") only if the feed includes several different / all or the majority of public safety agencies for the city/county named (not just a single police or fire department).  In this case, the secondary description and feed information page should summarize the different agencies that are on the feed.
• A description like "Springfield Police and Springfield Fire" should be changed to "Springfield Police and Fire" when possible.
• When a feed contains agencies from two or more counties, use a description like "xxx and yyy County Police" or "xxx, yyy, and zzz Counties Public Safety".
• When capitalizing words in descriptions, use the standard rules that apply to titles (see http://www.dailywritingtips.com/rules-for-capitalization-in-titles/ for information).