By Barbara Boyer
The Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA — Want to know whether there were robberies - or worse crimes - in particular sections of Philadelphia this week?
How about murders across the city over the past day or years?
Mug shots pique your interest? Check the rundown of the most wanted and the most violent.
The Philadelphia Police Department’s expanded Web site makes it easy, and thousands have tapped into www.ppdonline.org
The Web site has been upgraded to provide information for 27 crime categories, ranging from the worst violent offenses, including murder and rape, to property crimes, including thefts from autos or stolen vehicle-registration stickers.
When Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey took over in January, he promised a more transparent department that would provide more information to the public. In turn, he sought to keep commanders accountable and encourage the public to help solve more crimes and keep neighborhoods safer.
“People ought to know what’s going on. It’s not a secret,” Ramsey said, adding that the site would continue to grow. “If we’ve got an issue with crime in a specific area, people should be able to quickly have access to it.”
Some of the information is surprising. For example, in the last 30 days, 18 robberies have occurred near City Hall, considered a relatively safe area. Near the 35th District headquarters at Broad Street and Champlost Avenue in North Philadelphia, considered a high-crime area, 10 robberies were reported during the same period.
The Web site also includes a rundown of the city’s most wanted or most violent suspects. That led to the arrest of a sex offender who police learned - through a tipster - was working in a city school.
Although it’s too early to measure the full impact of the site, which has translations available in seven languages, officials said they do know that the thousands who are looking at it are averaging nearly four minutes per page at a time.
From May 26 through June 25, 9,575 people viewed 33,049 pages on the Web site. Twenty of those hits came from India, 19 from Canada, and three each from Croatia, South Korea and Japan.
With the initiative, Philadelphia’s police department joins a growing number across the United States posting crime data on a Web site, including those in Washington, where Ramsey was chief from 1998 to 2006, and Chicago, where Ramsey spent most of his career.
In Dallas, active calls are updated regularly throughout the day, showing police responding to reports, including robberies and burglaries in progress.
Philadelphia’s site does not do that. It also does not allow the public to see multiple crimes with a single request, as other sites do. Queries also cannot exceed 30-day periods.
That means that if people wanted to know how much crime occurred on their block since January 2007, they would have to run more than 80 queries for all violent crimes, burglaries and thefts.
That was done partly by design, officials said. There were concerns about overloading the server with requests for large amounts of information. Larger queries also require more sophisticated computers with faster connections.
“We were targeting people with the most commonly used systems and below to have access,” said Officer David Yarnell, who helped launch the site. “A large amount of data takes an enormous amount of time to download.”
Officials debated how much information to provide, including information about suspects and victims, which Philadelphia’s site also does not provide. They balanced the ability to post accurate information while considering privacy issues for victims.
The main goal, officials said, was to have a site that was visible, easy to use, and able to return information within eight seconds. They said studies show users often abandon searches that are not completed in under nine seconds.
“We’re pretty happy with it now and very proud of it,” Chief Inspector Michael Feeney said of the new system. “The more information we can put out, the better it is for the public.”
Two local crime experts agree.
JoAnne A. Epps, an expert in criminal law and procedure at Temple University, said although she would like to see even more information that would allow people to identify crime patterns more easily, she thought the department was going in the right direction.
“I generally think that more information is better than less,” Epps said. “The information is useful, but the question is: Is it adequate?”
Lawrence W. Sherman, of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Criminology, said that under Ramsey’s watch the Washington Web site became “one of the most advanced systems in the world.”
“It is an idea whose time has come,” Sherman said.
Gery Cardenas, director of information technology for the Philadelphia Police Department, said he hoped the site would meet 80 percent of requests for statistics. He expects traffic will increase as search engines, such as Google or Yahoo, access the information for their users.
The department’s site allows people to focus on a specific street, neighborhood or time period.
A query will return a map of the area with blue dots showing where each crime occurred. Clicking on the dots brings up specific information about the crime, including location and exact date and time. Users can zoom in and out to change the borders and see more or less information.
“Most people want to know if it’s safe for their kids to go out and play in the neighborhood,” Yarnell said. “Town-watch programs can use it to know how to patrol their area, residents can see how many car thefts there were and make sure they lock up their cars and remove things of value.
“That’s just one sliver of benefit to the public.”
Copyright 2008 The Philadelphia Inquirer