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Map Shows Correlation Of Shootings And Low Income Neighborhoods
By
Ben Yakas
Published Dec 8, 2013
Modified Dec 8, 2013
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Dec 8, 2013
Modified Dec 8, 2013
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While justifying the disproportionate amount of stop-and-frisks in poor neighborhoods, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told the Daily News that 97% of all shooting victims in NYC in 2012 "were black or Hispanic and reside in low-income neighborhoods." One Redditor has compiled shooting and income data, so we can see whether that supposed trend is holding in 2013 (see a bigger version here).
Redditor im_an_actual_dog combined shootings data from Jan-to-August 2013 with an income map based on the 2010 census to create the map above. The blue markers on the map represent non-fatal shootings, and the black ones are fatalities. He explained his own interest in the data: "Originally just compared the ethnicity and shooting maps because of personal interest. Then decided to incorporate it into a school project, and overlayed the ethnicity and poverty maps as part of my explanation."
The map of shootings in NYC over the first eight months of 2013 was originally made by fellow Redditor Ronanconway. That person explained to Business Insider how he created that map:
There's a number of sources I used to compile the list, none are "official" however. My particular sources are the Daily News, NY Post, DNAinfo, the twitter feeds NYCityAlerts and NYScanner, and some local sources like CBS and NBC news.
I used to run a crime blog for the city, and I still maintain a number of homicide and crime maps for a bunch of cities along the east coast, and it's local news that supplies all of those. Homicide and shootings tend to make the news reliably in a way that robberies and other crimes don't, so while there are surely shootings that did not make my list this is a good picture of shootings. Also, official statistics often count shootings in which there was no injury; my list is comprised of only shootings in at least one person was injured.
All of this of course does not in and of itself justify Kelly's defense of stop-and-frisk or how the NYPD has utilized it, nor does correlation concretely imply causation. As im_an_actual_dog put it, "I doubt income or race are direct causes of gun violence, but rather things that come with living in a poor neighborhood."
But it's still fascinating data, which will be even more fun to play around with not that the NYPD and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications has released an interactive crime map of the five boroughs that allows New Yorkers to see the locations of all reported felonies over the last 20 months.
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poor neighborhoods
shootings
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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