Search Tips | Search Major Crimes | Search Minor Crimes | Down with Crime stories
These pages contain details on more than a million crimes reported to the FBI and the Pennsylvania State Police from 1991 through 1999.
You can use your browser to see how police initially classified crimes on any city block during those nine years.
For all nine years, the listing include the seven types of crimes deemed ''major'' offenses and counted by the FBI for its national Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. The seven crimes include four crimes against people -- homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault -- and three crimes against property -- burglary, theft and auto theft. There were roughly 100,000 such offenses annually.
For 1997, 1998 and 1999 the database also includes about 100,000 lesser offenses each year, ranging from simple assaults to lesser sex offenses to vandalism.
For those three years, the database lists, as well, several thousand other complaints for each year classified as non-crimes. Detectives have placed some complaints in such non-crime codes as ''investigation of person,'' and ''investigation, protection, medical examination. In some, but not all such complaints, the original allegation involved a sex crime. In 1998, the department dramatically curtailed the use of the ''investigation of person'' coding for alleged sex offenses, but has instead used the ''medical examination'' classification on some occasions for such crimes.
This information was provided to The Inquirer by Police Commissioner John F. Timoney and his predecessor, former Commissioner Richard Neal. The department removed some information, including the names of victims or other people reporting a crime to police. On grounds of confidentiality, it also changed specific street addresses to less-precise block numbers. Also for confidentiality reasons, The Inquirer removed certain information from listings about sex offenses.
The information depicted here accurately reports the report initially filed by police. However, in some caes, reports are later updated to reflect new information, such as new arrests, reclassification of offenses and the recovery of stolen property. The reports here may not reflect such updates.
