Shootings: Jersey City’s Most Dangerous Neighborhoods
There’s no sugarcoating it — turn on the morning news or visit the homepage of your favorite news outlet, and it’s sad to see another report of a shooting, mass or individual. It breaks my heart.
Crime exists, and I understand it’s part of the world we live in. But when crime hits close to home, you can’t help but find it even more jarring. In the past couple years, there have been 2 homicides in my general neighborhood. Streets I walk on for my daily commute to work, stores I pass by while running errands.
While I can’t begin to understand why this happens, I did want to dive into the data to find any insights. Here we’ll take a look at a dataset shared by the city on Jersey City Shooting Incidents in 2015.
The dataset was pretty clean: each record had a datetime the shooting occurred, location (street address), shooting type (fatal or non-fatal) and latitude and longitude coordinates. There were 86 records and while I wasn’t wishing for a bigger dataset (ergo, more reported shootings), I did want to work with a larger sample size to spot more conclusive trends. I combined the data with the JCPD Service Calls dataset from my last post, specifically calls reporting gunshots fired or heard. Only looking at unique event numbers (since there can be multiple calls for the same incident) and records with latitude and longitude data, I now had a dataset of 527 records.
I focused my analysis on geolocation and datetime.
Geolocation
Below is a map plot of the 2 incident types, with each marker representing either a shooting (fatal/non-fatal) or gunshots (fired/heard). I overlaid a layer of the different Jersey City neighborhoods and added markers for the 4 JCPD district headquarters.
Here are questions I sought to answer:
Q: Does every report of a gunshot fired or heard equate to a shooting?
A: No, it doesn’t. Gunshot reports outnumber shootings more than 5 to 1. What does this mean? Not every gunshot fired/heard led to a reported shooting injury or death. It could also mean not all shootings were reported. Conversely, the same could be said about gunshots.
Q: Which areas in Jersey City are more prone to shootings and/or gunshots?
A: There are trouble areas in Jersey City, and you can see this from the abundance of markers in Bergen-Lafayette and Greenville. Liberty State Park, Port Industrial Area, and the Meadowlands are pretty much unscathed… but why though? It may be tied to the lack of residential property and the presence of more highways.
As for safe neighborhoods, Downtown is as safe as they come, but I was very surprised to learn there were at least 17 gunshot reports and one shooting.
Q: Does the presence of police force within the area inhibit crime?
A: I’d like to believe the presence of law enforcement nearby lessens crime, but from this map, it almost doesn’t seem so. In Bergen-Lafayette, shootings were reported within the vicinity of the JCPD West District Headquarters, some even 2–3 blocks away from the station. It’s possible gunshot reports could be criminal/police altercations, but we don’t know definitively.
Greenville fared better, but you can still see a shooting reported 3 blocks from the South station.
Additionally, a good number of incidents occurred on major, visible streets, i.e. MLK Drive and Ocean Avenue. Foot traffic and vehicle activity didn’t deter crime in these cases.
Datetime
To examine reports by time of day, I plotted the count of records by hour of day and day of week (Figure A). Lighter color areas indicate little to no incidents, while darker green areas show more activity.
Q: When are shootings/gunshots most likely to occur?
A: Weekday commuting times from 6a-6p are lighter with fewer incidents, but you start to see an uptick in incidents later in the night, and as you move into the weekend. The heaviest times with the most reports are Friday nights leading into the weekend, and weekend nights themselves: late Friday night into early Saturday morning, late Saturday night into early Sunday morning, and late Sunday night.
Questions:
— Did you expect to see a high number of shooting/gunshot reports in certain Jersey City neighborhoods or blocks? Would you expect these same areas to have elevated levels of other crimes, i.e. robbery, muggings, car theft, etc.?
— Were you surprised by the number of incidents occurring near the Jersey City Police Department headquarters?
— Shootings/gunshot reports were highest late at night and on weekend nights. Do you think the same trend would hold season to season? And overall would we see more reports in the summertime when more people are outdoors OR fewer in winter when the days are shorter and temperatures are lower?
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Challenges
One challenge I ran into when mapping the data was plotting unique shooting/gunshot incidents that occur at the same geolocation (latitude & longitude coordinates). As far as I know, this currently isn’t possible in Carto (the markers would overlap each other), although I plan to research and try a few workarounds
Suggested further analysis
— Get historical data for shootings (2013–2014, 2016–2017) to prove or refute our conclusions on JC problem areas and times of day/week
— Compare JC data against NYC shooting data to see if seasonal/time trends are the same. Does such a dataset exist?
— Plot records of other JC crimes and determine if the same dangerous areas hold true
Jersey City Shooting Incidents data from Jersey City Open Data portal here
Jersey City Police Department Service Calls data from Jersey City Open Data portal here
