Crime, Courts, and Corrections:Call for Service

This guide is part of a larger guide on Crime, Courts, and Corrections in the City of Pittsburgh.

In Allegheny County, data on emergency calls for service are managed by the Allegheny County Emergency Services. When a 911 call for service is made, dispatchers from the County field the call and direct it to the appropriate police, fire, paramedic, or other emergency responder. While the emergency calls for service data is managed by Allegheny County, it is owned by each municipality receiving the call for service.

Non-emergency calls for service are made through the City of Pittsburgh’s 311 system managed by the City’s Department of Innovation and Performance. Much like the 911 phone number is universal in the U.S. to report an emergency, the 311 system is a phone number people in many cities can use for non-emergency service requests. Baltimore, Maryland was the first U.S. City to implement a 311 system beginning in 1996. The process in-use in Pittsburgh is used to not only record requests for service, the 311 system is used internally by the City to manage work orders generated by requests, provide feedback to the person requesting service, and measure the City’s performance in customer response. The 311 program distributes non-emergency service requests to a number of different departments, including Public Safety, Public Works, and Permits, Licenses, and Inspections. Actual locations of service requests are now available for some request types. Location of other requests have been obfuscated to protect the identity of the person making the complaint. Data is published hourly to the Regional Data Center’s open data portal.

What's Included in the Data:

Publicly Available

• 311 non-emergency requests are available as open data

Not Publicly Available

• No calls for service data is available as open data

Where to Find the Data:

• City of Pittsburgh non-emergency service requests are published through the Western Pennsylvania Region Data Center and are updated hourly.
• The 311 data is also featured on the City of Pittsburgh's Burgh's Eye View mapping tool

Things to Know:

• The 311 data user guide contains everything you could ever want to know about 311.