Analysis of Shooting Victimizations in Philadelphia

For this project I used the software ArcGIS, which is a geographic information system that can visualize patterns and clusters among several locations. All of the data used was retrieved from ERSI's application programming interface (API) where a ton of GIS data layers are available for public use. It is important to create city-, state-, district-, and/or county-wide visualizations of crimes because it can assist law enforcement, policymakers, and researchers to pinpoint hotspots to accurately implement preventative measures. Such maps can also identify specific landmarks where crime tends to group such as major roads, stores or recreational areas. Crime pattern theory (CPT) goes hand-in-hand with this data software because it is rooted in crime and the location of it. Crime attractors or crime generators play a huge role as to where crimes occur, which involves potential offenders at places that are unrelated to criminal activity (Hiropoulos & Porter, 2014).

In this particular analysis, I wanted to first visualize all of the shooting victimizations in the 17th Police District. The second map shows the mean center and a one standard deviation ellipse area that surrounds an area where a cluster of the shootings occurred. The standard deviation tells us how spread out the data is from each other. Therefore, the data within the ellipse means that those shootings are within one standard deviation from the mean, or they are very close together. The third map I created shows the same type of analysis, but narrowing it down to fatal and non-fatal shootings.

Figure 1 shows the number of shooting victimization where each yellow pushpin represents one victim. The yellow transparent background represents where the 17th police district covers. Although it may not look like it, there are 313 shooting victimizations shown above, and the dates range from January 2015-July 2021. This map is provided to give baseline data which will be compared with the mean of fatal and non-fatal shootings.

Figure 2 represents the baseline data of the mean center and one standard deviation ellipse area that is depicted blue ring in the map. This ellipse covers approximately 0.62 square miles and involves 193 victims. The distribution of shootings were fairly spread out, so it is not just one or two specific areas of interest. However, many clusters were on Dickinson Street that almost runs horizontally half way through the ellipse area. Forty-eight shootings alone were on Dickinson St. or directly near it. I also found several clusters of shootings between Wharton Square and Ralph Brooks Park which are approximately 0.4 miles apart. The shooting victimizations range from 0-1600 feet from either establishment.

This third and final map shown in Figure 3 breaks the victimizations further as to whether the shootings were fatal or not. The legend on the right hand side shows a 0 next to the gray symbols which represents non-fatal, and the 1 next to the red symbols is fatal. The means and deviations of non-fatal and fatal do not differ that much in terms of location. Unfortunately, the fatal ellipse area (0.72 sq. miles) is bigger than the non-fatal area (0.6 sq. miles), but does not cover too many more shootings (n=197) than non-fatal (n=189). Both of the ellipse areas shown for fatal and non-fatal shootings overlap with in the ellipse area shown in Figure 2.

In conclusion, the deviation, or the spread of the distribution of incidents, are widely spread out throughout the whole 17th police district. However, I do not know these areas personally, therefore I do not know if there are certain areas that have more disadvantages than other areas. I tried doing research on the areas where I see more clusters of crime including Dickinson Street, and the areas between Wharton Square and Ralph Brooks Park, but I did not find much information. I did find that majority of the housing on Dickinson St. is extremely expensive, but what housing in Philadelphia isn't? The identification of grouping of shootings in this district can allow law enforcement and related persons to closely examine these areas to see what is going on. Now that locations are targeted, people can focus on cracking down the sources of the shootings that may not be clear at first including gang violence, access to grocery stores, and other important stores. The 17th police district definitely has a ton of parks and playgrounds, but they can easily become vacant when violence strikes there. Also, the concentrations of crime can assist emergency medical technicians (EMTs), police, and firefighters in being safe when responding to certain areas. Such resources including emergency call boxes or flyers with contact information could increase eyes on the street to prevent crime. If there is a significant concentration of crime in a certain location, there has to be some reason why. So, it is important for law enforcement to prevent situations early.