Recently, I saw a news that police increased patrols outside schools in Manhattan on Wednesday after a series of possibly connected shootings left three people injured. It is always shocking to see school may not be the safest place when it should be. Also it remind me there is a mass subway shooting in Brooklyn back to Spring 2022 which is a year ago. The U-Haul van that the police say the shooter used were found one block away from my home. That’s the first time I think shooting is really close to me, in fact, it is close to every NYC residents. During the research, I found that incidents of violent crime remain at historic lows in New York City. But people’s views on guns and crime are often more influenced by what they see and hear, rather than by hard numbers which pointed out by Fola Akinnibi and Raeedah Wahid from online article titled “Fear of Rampant Crime Is Derailing New York City’s Recovery” (https://www.bloomberg.com/ graphics/2022-is-nyc-safe-crime-stat-reality/).

I found a dataset which has breakdown of every shooting incident in NYC. The data is manually extracted every quarter and reviewed by the Office of Management Analysis and Planning before being posted on the NYPD website.

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First of all, I would like to see which boroughs of nyc has the most shooting case in 2022. As we can see from the plot, Brooklyn has the most shooting case back in 2022, and Bronx is next, Manhattan and Queens are 3rd and 4th place with almost only half of the case of Bronx and Brooklyn. I am not really surprise like I mentioned in the introduction, we do have major shooting incident happens, and it kinda related to my neighborhood.

However, it is not fair to say Brooklyn is the most unsafe area in the NYC boroughs since we should take population as consideration for this statement.

That is why I create a table and add the 2022 population that I got it from http://www.citypopulation.de/en/usa/newyorkcity/ Brooklyn has the highest population, and Queens is close to Brooklyn as 2nd place. From the plot we can see Bronx actually has a much higher percentage of shooting compare with other 4. I would said Queens and Staten Island is the safer place to live.

Then I am wondering if the shooting happens indoor or outdoor area. I think more outdoor shooting mean unsafer since indoor it could related to domestic violence which does not really related to area safety. As we can see Bronx’s outdoor shooting ratio is higher that avg of 5 boroughs which mean Bronx area is really more unsafe compare with other areas.

Up next I was thinking of something like subway shooting is common? Is it safe to take public transit?

The result is making sense, a lot of the case is on the street. Place like packing lot and transit is safer, i guess it is due to CCTV.

If there is more police on street in the area to patrol, it may help because high shooting on street case may cause by insufficient deterrence from police. it may have indirect relation. I create a plot to list the top 10 PRECINCT that they may have a need to increase police force.

On top of police and law force, education may able to help a little bit as well. I think it will be a long way to see the result, but I believe school actually play important role. It is slowly and surely to resolve the high amount of shooting case with different party helps.

I am actually shock that a lot of shooting case are done by very young age resident. If we try to put more responsibility on teacher. I think education labor needs more fund since they are mostly underpay.

I am glad that NYC public these data so people can know what is going on with where they live. I think the plot simply but straight to the point for us to understand there is a huge improvement area.

I hope government need to understand indirect area like school also needs support if they want to lower the case. From 2017/18 data, we can see Bronx actually has the highest amount per pupil. However, maybe they need more that to support both teachers and school system.

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Maybe I can pick school funding as project next time.

https://openbudget.ny.gov/schoolFundingTransparency.html

Visualization https://openbudget.ny.gov/sft/sft-visualization.html