St Petersburg FL Crimes

THE ST PETERSBURG CRIME DATABASE FUNCTION ON THIS SITE IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE. We set this site up in April 2009. The database worked until December 2011 when we had some hosting problems.

Many St Pete people would look at the site, even send in reports as if we were the St Petersburg Police Department. However, there was never any financial support and we don't have the resources to set it up again ourselves. We expected that we would get more support from the people of St Petersburg, FL than it got. St Petersburg has one of the highest crime and violent crime rates in the USA. You get what you deserve.


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Police Calls For Service Explained

This web site is called St Petersburg Crimes, but not every record listed here is for a crime. These are Calls for service. Read on, and you will find out what Calls for Service are.

Go here to see how to search for the currently listed Calls For Service.

Please note: the St Pete Crimes site is not affiliated with the St Petersburg Police Department. Please don't contact us about any issue with any of these police calls, and especially don't contact us if you have a crime to report. For police emergency matters, call 911, and for non-emergency, call 727-893-7780.

We have no access to police reports beyond the calls for service data.

 

What Are "Police Calls For Service"?

THEY ARE CALLS, NOT CRIMES : This is NOT a list of "crimes" that have occurred in the neighborhoods of St Petersburg, FL. Instead, they are a list of the "calls for service" or "dispatched police calls" reflecting each time someone called the police for service.

According to San Antonio, TX, Police, in most areas, 100 "calls for service" will result in an officer taking approximately 10 "offense reports" for serious crimes (UCR Part I Crimes: Homicide, Sexual Assault, Robbery, Assault, Burglary, Theft, Vehicle Theft), and another 10-20 reports for crimes such as graffiti, gambling, etc. The remaining calls are usually for non-crime issues, such as false burglar alarms, cat-in-tree, police assisting public, information requests, and so on. The same ratio may apply in St Pete.

Calls Are Titled As Dispatched

Calls are titled as they are called in and dispatched. For example, a call may be dispatched as a "robbery", because that was what it was called in by the citizen, but later the officer finds it is a "burglary." This would be listed in the Calls for Service report as a "robbery" (how it was called in and dispatched, even though it was actually a burglary).

One Event, Multiple Calls

Multiple listings do not always mean multiple crimes. Calls For Service may list three "robberies" at the same location, same date, same time. In fact, there may only have been one robbery, but three separate calls to the police reporting it.

As well as calls from citizens which go to the Police Communication Center, when you flag down a officer, the officer calls in, so it would also show up. Also, if someone shows up at the Police Department front desk, e.g. to turn themselves in, then that would count as a call. This was found out when it was noticed what a hot bed of crime 1300 1st Ave N was, until it was realized that was the address of the Police Station.

Privacy Related Omissions

The St Petersburg Police Department's calls for service data omits the following incidents for privacy reasons:

Rape, Sexual Battery, Child or Adult Abuse.

Meaning of the Data

When you look at the list of calls for service or you look at an individual record, you will see a number of fields.

In the original material provided from the St Petersburg Police Department, the following columns are shown. In the main displays on this web site, we have omitted several of them as we believe that they are of no relevance to the public or provide little useful additional information.

Call # The C# is the report or case number issued for that call.

Date of Call

Time Call Received

Time Dispatched

Time Arrived at Scene

Time Service Completed

Codes N, L or J N = Now Occurring, L = Late Reported, J = Just occurred

Complaint Type, e.g. Burglary, Assault, loud music, barking dog, trash in road, etc.

E# = event number. All events are identified this way and if a report is generated, a C# is given. The SPPD get about 10 to 1 events over Reports issued for their Calls for Service.

Officer Name Assigned

Primary Unit Assigned - the patrol car assigned to the call

Address Where Officer is Sent

Complainant Name - this is how the person who called in did or didn't identify themselves.

We have decided to hide this as we know that we are going to get people complaining that the drug dealer down the street has an Iphone and found out who snitched on him. The caller information is a juicy tidbit, but in the interest of encouraging citizen participation and not provoking revenge crimes, we are not showing it.

LEV3 or Neighborhood / Zone # - St Petersburg Police Department has divided the City up into three Districts, and each of those is divided into Neighborhood or Zones. The best way to use this site it probably to search on your Neighborhood number for a specified date to see what has happened. To see the SPPD Districts and associated neighborhoods go here.

ESZ - Emergency Service Zone is a geographic region which is associated with the 911 system. If someone knows their ESZ, that may prove more specific than neighborhood when they search for calls in their area. We could probably leave the ESZ off but it could prove useful for experienced users, who are prepared to figure out by examining existing calls what their ESZ is.

Someone at SPPD told us that it is sometimes called the Crime Tract Number and it is a smaller geographical area of measurement than the Neighborhood or Zone #. We are uncertain as to the veracity of this statement.

The ESZ used by SPPD doesn't seem to correspond with the Census Tract Numbers that they use (it is close though) and these tracts can approximate the same geographical size as Neighborhood or Zone #, but there is unlikely to be much in the way of a one to one correspondence. For example, Historic Kenwood is Zones 81 and part of Zone 83 on the SPPD Neighborhood Map and part of it is covered by Census Tract Number 229 but we also see reports outside that Tract Number which have an ESZ of 229. On the other hand one SPPD officer told me that the Census Tracts for Historic Kenwood were 232 and 258. They bear no resemblance to the ones on the map.

To see the Census Tracts go to the SPPD Census Tract Page that we have prepared or to the Pinellas County GIS page. At the latter site you can also see there a 911 grid which has no correspondence with any information in the SPPD's data.

How Up To Date Is The Information Here?

We receive the data in the form of a text file called the "Sergeant's Log" from the Saint Petersburg Police Department on the first work day of the week, which is usually Mondays, with a list of calls for the week ending the previous Friday. So you will not be able to look up records more recent than the previous Friday. So, in no way can our service be considered a list of CURRENT events.

You may find that searches done soon after we have updated the database do not return all possible results. This is because we run jobs to fully index the new records. It may take some hours for the jobs to run to completion and allow valid searches including these new records to be done.

Note at this point, you may find duplicate records on the database. This is because the data sent to us by St Petersburg Police Department can overlap, with some calls reported in one week and also in the next. We are working on fixing this.

Our current data is for the period December 12, 2008 through to September 16, 2011. Due to database issues we are only allowing queries on data for the last 30 days.

For some reason the Police haven't included data for August 1-2, 2009. If you find other dates missing, please advise us. We also have the data for April 11, 2008 through April 18, 2008 for a special reason. While using this site please check out our unsolved case and contact us if you can help at all. If you have a request for data from a particular period since August 2007, please let us know and we will endeavor to load it for you.

DP means Directed Patrol

A unit may be specifically designated to perform a selected activity. Directed patrols may be used for such things as escorts, selected traffic control posts, or certain crime prevention activities. Another kind of directed activity that can sometimes be handled by routine patrols are those that do not require the patrol to "go out of service." An example might be building checks. On the other hand, if there are a large number of building checks to be made, such as at a depot, it may be more effective to use a directed patrol.

According to a respondent on the St Petersburg Police Department Forum of the Law Enforcement Officers Affairs (LEOAffairs.com) web site:

"....smoke and mirrors tactic that claims an officer is taken out of the rotation for calls and can focus on a specific problem. The real problem is that the officer checks out on a DP and is on it for 2 minutes then gets pulled for a priority call but the DP stat is still there. A lot of DP's are pulled with the intention of working them throughout the shift but then that never happens. Stat still counted."

XPORT MENTAL PERSON

This is exactly what it says. The St Pete Police Department acts as a taxi service for crazy people. This is because an ambulance is restricted to using the restraints that they have, while a Police Officer can use handcuffs and other means at his or her disposal to limit the activity of the subject.

Again according to our friends on the St Petersburg Police Department Forum of the Law Enforcement Officers Affairs (LEOAffairs.com) web site:

Xport Mental Person = conducting a Baker Act, which is a person who wants to hurt themselves or others is taken into custody then to PEMHS

The Xport Mental Person is also a taxi service in some instances. Sometimes a person is Baker acted by a shrink or at Suncoast on Central Av and police are called to do the transport instead of an ambulance.

Again from LEOAffairs.com, here is the explanation of a couple of other event types.

Checking Subject = officer makes contact with a person. A lot of times this turns into a self-initiated arrest or Field Interview (FIR). Good old fashioned police work.

SRO/SLO = I'm not sure but I think it is the SRO at a school checking out for the day so he is active in the computer.

SRO means School Resource Officer.

If you have any other questions (or anwers) about the meaning of the data, please contact us.


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