Crime and Confusion

There are two shooting related stories in today's news, the first a homicide the second this weekend's gang summit. I don't have all of the shooting data from last year at hand, see previous post, but have it backed up somewhere. From what I can tell, we are about where we were last year but one less shooting and one more homicide. As of 3/10/2010 - shootings = 12 and of those, 3 were homicides. As of today we are at 11 and 4..I think. I went to check the shooting list and map that the TFP has on their Right2Know page, but as of today, it is exactly one month out of date, and the last shooting it has listed was upgraded to a homicide.(The bookings, which account for more screen real estate are, however, up to date:) Hopefully they will get that updated soon. I checked CrimeReports.com to see what it had on the homicides, nothing. (Granted one just happened last night.) This might just have to do with how the incidents are upgraded and how those upgrades do or don't get sent in the file to CR.com.

It is a bit confusing trying to catch up on this type of thing if you haven't been gathering it along the way. Even though there is a lot of room for improvement, we have come a long way in the last 6 to 12 months. This time last year, there was no CrimeReports map, no Right2Know, no regular Tweets from CPD, no Chattarati Public Safety blog, and I am sure several other things that contribute to our ability to monitor public safety issues.

Shootings by Day/Council District

This graphic is one of several that are taking shape from the shooting data. I am taking the different descriptive dimensions in the dataset and combining them to see what is there. Other dimensions include school zone, school district, neighborhood (defined using the neighborhood map from the Ochs Center), and day and time of incident. While a lot of these pieces aren't a surprise, it is interesting to look at them in new ways. For instance, I would not have guessed that, for this year, Tuesdays would be a big day for shootings second to Saturday (11 and 13 respectively). In District 8, Tuesday beats Saturday 7 to 2. Below are the District 8 incidents on the map coded by day.

2010 Chattanooga Shootings

I have been working with some people for a while on mapping the sites of the shootings happening in town. There is still a lot of work to do on the data driving the map, but with this being a big part of the conversation going on in the city, I wanted to go ahead and post the map in progress. In this static form it tells us three things. Shooting locations/approximate locations marked by dots, orange dots represent shootings resulting in injury, red resulting in death. The size of the dots corresponds to the number of incidents at that location. (This view focuses on the heart of the city and, therefore, does not include the Sanders Rd. incident.) Once the data is fine tuned and triple checked, there will be an interactive version of this map. As this is a work in progress, please let me know if you see any obvious errors on the map.

Reminder: This map represents three facts and does not represent any crime analysis or interpretation. Oh, and you should click it open to another tab to see if you haven't already.