Chattanooga police recorded 1,074 field interviews between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. from April through September 2026, up from 534 in the same months of 2025 (+101%) and the most for that window in any year since the category first appears in 2017; the previous high was 1,350 in 2019. Daytime field interviews (7 a.m. to 10 p.m.) went the other way, from 1,147 to 1,060 (-7.6%), and are about half their 2019 level (2,137). As a result, 50.3% of field interviews happened overnight, up from 31.8% in 2025; in every year from 2017 through 2025 the overnight share was between 23.0% and 38.7%.

Field interviews are recorded under the department’s non-crime code (91Z). From 2024 through 2026, none of these cases listed a criminal offense.

Overnight counts first rose in August 2025 (135, against 55 to 92 a month earlier that year) and climbed further in spring and summer 2026: 125 in April, 145 in May, 177 in June, 227 in July, 232 in August and 168 in September. From May through August 2026 there were more overnight field interviews than daytime ones. In the first 25 days of October the overnight count (104) was close to the same days of 2025 (90).

Most of the increase is late at night: 11 p.m. went from 120 to 241, midnight from 98 to 215, 1 a.m. from 72 to 158 and 2 a.m. from 60 to 123. All six police zones were higher overnight: Adam South 147 to 314, Adam North 112 to 209, Baker South 133 to 202, Charlie North 42 to 135, Baker North 62 to 134 and Charlie South 38 to 80. Every day of the week rose, Monday the most (54 to 162). The overnight interviews took place at 702 block addresses, up from 394, and the ten busiest addresses accounted for 126 of them (11.7%), compared with 67 (12.5%) in 2025, so the rise is spread across the city rather than concentrated at a few locations.

Other overnight police records grew much less. Cases other than field interviews logged between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. went from 6,791 to 7,374 (+8.6%), and their share of all such cases barely moved (27.8% to 28.1%). Overnight Suspicious Activity cases fell from 348 to 283 and overnight Miscellaneous Information entries rose from 2,518 to 3,038, so no other non-crime category dropped enough to suggest the field interviews are simply relabeled entries.

The dataset does not say why this happened. It cannot distinguish a change in patrol deployment or shift scheduling from a change in when or how officers record field interviews, or from a change in activity on the street at night. Each case number is counted once, the one case marked Unfounded is excluded, and times are the incident times in the published file. The comparison uses April through September because the published file has far fewer records for February and March 2026 than for the months around them.