Pittsburgh residents can see a general overview of criminal activity across the city with a new dashboard launched Wednesday.
The move comes after the previous data portal provided by the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police was taken offline over the summer. Officials said the old portal wasn’t being regularly updated and thus offered inaccurate information. They decided to take it down rather than update it as the new dashboard was in the works.
Bureau crime analyst Hannah Geczi helped develop the new data portal. She noted that the updated dashboard only shows violent crimes and property crimes.
“So, it's not reflective of everything that the bureau deals with,” she said.
The data, all of which is for 2023, can be broken down by police zone, neighborhood, crime type and date. It is pulled from police reports filed in with the bureau’s records management system, which stores all records of reported criminal activity. It does not include any personally identifying information or addresses. Violent sexual crimes are also excluded.
While past iterations of the database have relied on more finalized police reports that may take longer to process, the new portal uses initial police reports. That means the dataset can be updated more quickly. Currently, the plan is to manually update it on a monthly basis. But the police are transitioning to a new record management system, and when it is in place, officials hope it could help provide “as close to a real-time data feed as possible, which would allow for more frequent or automatic updates to the information,” they said in a press release.
“By making comprehensive crime data publicly available and easily accessible, residents are better informed about their own neighborhoods, the city as a whole, and the work of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police. As Chief, I am committed to driving accountability through transparency and the Police Data Portal is another building block toward that goal,” police chief Larry Scirotto said in a statement.
Geczi echoed the sentiment. She said the goal of the dashboard is to give residents more information about violent crimes and property crimes in their neighborhoods.
“We want to make that information accessible and have people know what's going on in their community,” she said.
Find the data portal here.
