Best Bet

Your best chance of finding a specific crime is to search by the type of crime and date. Virtually all of the more than one million crimes have valid dates and classifications.

Address Searches

The original computer information supplied by police contained thousands of typographical errors and/or unconventional abbreviations for crime locations. Some addresses contained street directions, many did not. Some addresses included street designations, such as "street" or "avenue," the majority did not. Some addresses were listed by block and street. Thousands more listed only intersections.

Tens of thousands of systematic errors and abbreviations were corrected by the Inquirer. However, enough problems remain to make locating some crimes by address difficult.

As a result, you are offered three ways to search by address. One of these methods should help you find a crime in question.

Block and Street Searches

The majority of the crimes are listed by block and street.

If you are searching by block and street, enter as little information as possible.

• Do not enter street directions (N, S, E or W.)

• Do not enter street designations (street, avenue or boulevard).

• Enter as few characters as possible for a street. (Entering "chest" will find "Chestnut St." Entering "Chestnut" will not.)

• Enter "unit", "first" or "0" (zero), without the quotation marks for Unit blocks.

• If you still do not find the crime in question, click on the option to show all intersections with the street name you entered.

The street name you enter will give you all "matches" that begin with the characters you enter. If you enter an invalid block, the computer will attempt to correct the block entry and continue with the search.

If you do not enter at least a total of three characters or if you enter non-numeric characters in the block field, the computer will simply clear the search page.

Intersection Searches

Again, enter as little information as possible. The order of your entries does not matter. An entry of "Waverly" and "19th" will find crimes reported for 19th and Waverly.

• Do not enter street directions (N, S, E or W) at first.

• If you do not get the search results you want, try entering the street direction before the street name (as in N 33 for North 33rd Street)

• Do not enter street designations (street, avenue or boulevard).

If you do not find numeric intersections for single-digit streets, try adding a leading zero to the search. For example, if you don't find Two street with an entry of "2," try entering "02."

The street names you enter will give you all "matches" that begin with the characters you enter. An entry of "town" will not find "Germantown Ave." An entry of "Germ" may.

Unconventional Address Searches

If you still can't find a crime, try the unconventional search. Again, enter as few characters as possible.

The characters you enter will give you all "matches" that contain those characters anywhere in the address. An entry of "hall" will give you "City Hall," "Memorial Hall" and "Paschall 16th". A search in this area, however, will not return conventional block/street or intersection addresses such as the 4800 block of Paschall or Paschall and 48th.

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Airport Searches

More than 3,000 crimes were reported at Philadelphia International Airport between 1991 and 1998. Because of the volume of crimes, a separate area has been provided for airport searches.

Click here for airport searches and select the options in the drop-down menus. Results will be displayed in pages, with a maximum of 25 crimes displayed per page.