By visiting The Inquirer's Web site, Philadelphia Online, readers now can pore over incident reports on 700,000 major crimes recorded by police from 1991 through 1997.

Go to http://home.phillynews.com/crime to call up lists of crimes sorted by type of offense, date of occurrence, or location. You can use your browser to look at all robberies reported in Philadelphia on a given day, for instance -- or all crimes reported on your block during the covered period.

Readers also can pull up a file on each individual incident, which includes a description of what happened, whether an arrest was made, the cash value of a loss, whether a weapon was used, and how police classified the crime for statistical purposes.

The database, provided by the Police Department, allows the public to examine the official record of crime in Philadelphia, as reported by local authorities to the FBI.

It is far from complete: Police acknowledge that incidents have been routinely downgraded from major to minor crimes to keep them out of the FBI's city-by-city survey of crime in America, the Uniform Crime Report.

The listing is of "Part I" offenses -- those deemed major crimes by the FBI. They are: homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and auto theft.

The listing does not include lesser "Part II" crimes, such as simple assault, prostitution, gambling, drug offenses and vandalism. Therefore, crimes that were downgraded from Part I to Part II are not in the database.

Before releasing the 1991-97 data to The Inquirer, the Police Department removed some information on confidentiality grounds, including the names of the people who reported the crimes. The department also substituted block numbers for specific street addresses.

The database does not include adjustments made periodically by the department to reflect additional arrests, recovery of stolen property, or other changes in the status of a case. The department declined to provide that information.

Philadelphia police report about 95,000 major crimes a year. Reports on about 20,000 of these are updated -- in the vast majority of cases to indicate recovery of a stolen car. In rare instances, police conclude after investigation that no crime occurred and the report is labeled "unfounded." That happens in less than 1 percent of all reported crimes.