Crime, Courts, and Corrections Guide:Incidents

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

Crime incident reports are often created following a police investigation. Incident reports may also be generated from calls for service.

Incident data is published on a nightly basis by the City of Pittsburgh. The quality of incident level data may improve over time, and data published on the open data portal will reflect these changes. The data is presented in two separate files on the open data portal.

• The Blotter will contain only the previous thirty days of reported crimes.The initial incident data can often change in the month following the initial incident report.Records older than thirty days will be deleted from this file and valid incidents will be moved to the archived dataset.Appropriate use of this file includes notifying community members of recent incidents.
• Once quality control and coding procedures have been run against the data by the Police Bureau, the data will then be published to the archived data file thirty days after the initial report. Data in the archived file will be of greater data quality and is the file most appropriate for reporting crime statistics. Data within this file is also subject to change. Archived data (2005-2015) is also being shared as part of this release.

Pittsburgh Police do respond to incidents outside the City borders from time to time. For this reason, some incidents are mapped to locations outside the City. These can occur when City police assist police in other jurisdictions, when City police pursue a suspect across the City line to another municipality, and when a City officer happens to respond to an incident while outside the City.

What's Included in the Data

Publicly Available

• Location generalized to a block (police zone for sex crimes)
• Type of incident
• Date
• Time
• Whether or not the incident has been cleared

Not Publicly Available

• Victim’s identity
• Actual incident location

Where to Find the Data

• Most-recent 30 days of incident data (The Blotter) is published through the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center and is updated daily.
• Uniform Crime Reporting Data Recent Archive (Over 30 days old) is published through the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center and is updated daily.
• Pittsburgh Public Safety Press Releases contain additional information on selected incidents
• This data is also featured on the City of Pittsburgh's Burgh's Eye View mapping tool

Things to Know

• Sex crimes will only be reported at the police zone level to protect victim confidentiality. All other crimes will be reported at the block level (based on street address range).
• Incident data is published using the UCR hierarchical classification system developed by the FBI. Multiple crimes may be included in the same incident, and incidents are coded by the highest-level offense.
• Unfounded incidents will be removed from the database. As the status or classification of an incident changes, these changes will be reflected on the open data portal. When using data, it is a good practice to cite when it was accessed.
• Incidents solely reported by other police departments operating in the City (campus police, Port Authority, etc) are not captured in this data.
• Archived data (2005-15) may first be published without coordinates, but coordinates will be made available as additional geocoding processes are run on the data.
• Not all incidents are reported. Incident reporting rates may vary from one community or person to the next.