NYC Shootings Analysis

Daily

There is a strong correlation between the number of shootings and the time of day. Every borough exhibits similar trends where shootings increase dramatically during the late afternoon and into the night. Shootings are very low during the mornings around 7:00 and 8:00 am and tend to increase after 10:00 am.

Monthly

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There is also a correlation between the number of shootings and the month. Summer months like June and July tend to have a greater number of shootings than winter months. For boroughs with higher counts of shootings, this correlation tends to be stronger. For all boroughs, February had the lowest number of shootings.

Yearly

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From 2006 to 2019, there has been a general decrease in shootings. Although our dataset only contained shootings to May 2019, there is still a general downwards trend from the past decade.

Population

Staten island’s population is significantly lower, which makes sense since it also has the lowest number of shootings in 2018. Manhattan has the highest population, but second lowest number of shootings. To explore this phenomenon, we also plotted shootings with per capita GDP.

Per Capita GDP

GDP is a measure of an area’s economic output, which is a good measurement of the standard of living in each area, or in this case, borough.

Utilizing this plot with the previous population plot, we can predict why Manhattan has a large population, but a relatively small number of shootings. The plot shows that in 2018, the GDP per capita of Manhattan was significantly higher than the other boroughs, which means that it has a higher standard of living. With this higher standard of living, it is easier to understand why Manhattan’s number of shootings is relatively low.

In the next plot, we took out Manhattan to take a closer look at the other boroughs. Compared to Brooklyn and the Bronx, Queens has a lower population and a higher GDP per capita, which could explain its lower shooting count. Brooklyn and the Bronx have similar populations, GDP per capita, and shooting count.

Map

This is a map of the exact shooting locations. This map also gives an idea of where the boroughs are in relation to each other and how big they are. Brooklyn and Queens are connected and are separated from Manhattan and the Bronx by a river. Most shootings in Brooklyn occured in the west region closest to Queens and most shootings in Queens occured in the southern region. The blank rectangle in Manhattan (40.77, -73.96) is Central Park and the blank spot in Brooklyn (40.66, -74.98) is Prospect Park. Looking closer at this dataset, the is no location description for parks in the dataset. There is most likely missing information for shootings in parks.

Frequent Locations

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Most shootings happened in housing. Public housing, which is provided for people with low incomes, had the highest number of shootings. This was followed by apartments and private housing. Grocery stores and bars/ clubs followed the different housings in shooting count.

Perpetrator

Most perpetrators are males between the ages of 18 to 44. There are very few perpetrators over the age of 65.

Most perpetrators were Black, folloed by, White Hispanic, Black Hispanic, and White. We decided not to include American Indian/ Alaskan Native or Asian/ Pacific Islander, as the count for both races was significantly lower than the others.

Victim

Like the perpitrators, most victims were also male. There are slighty more female victims than perpetrators. The dispersion of ages is also similar to that of the perpetrators. There are also more victims than perpetrators, signifying that some perpetrators had multiple victims.

The victim’s races are distributed extremely similar to the perpetrator’s races