Run to the Rita's

Get Chilled, not Killed The People of Philadelphia have long known the firearm foiling properties of Rita's Water Ice. If you're eating the ice, you won't get iced. You got the gelatti, you won't get shotty. But is this really true? Gritty, if you're reading this, I've got some good news. It's all true, and we can prove it with data.

Rita's Geography Rita's operates 26 locations across the city. There are prominent voids in South Philly and West Philly, no doubt responsible fore untold additional bloodshed.

Normalizing for Surroundings Now we need a baseline of gun violence to compare to. We could divide the land area of Philly by 0.7854 (the area within a .5 mi radius) and then divide the number of shootings by the result of that, giving us a comparison to the city as a whole. But this would include industrial and forested areas of the city (where shootings are virtually non-existent), dragging down the average. So for this study, I traced these areas out using satellite imagery and subtracted them from the land area total.

Calculation Total Land Area: 134.36 mi² -Industrial/Forest Area: 29.32 mi² =Adjusted Land Area: 105.04 mi² Total 2022 Shootings: 1,788 Non-fatal | 474 Fatal ÷ (105.04 mi²÷0.7854 mi²) = Adjusted City Baseline: 13.4 Non-fatal | 3.5 Fatal

88.5% of Rita's locations are safer than the city average. There are only 3 Rita's locations more prone to gun violence than the city average. However, there is immense variability. 6 locations saw no shootings in 2022, while one particularly unlucky location on Stenton Ave saw six people killed nearby in one year.

Alternative Explanations As a formality, I have to come up with some other potential reasons for this dramatic and, let's be honest, self-explanatory correlation. There are two potential confounding variables, which might correlate with the prevalence of both gun violence and Rita's. Poverty Rita's might not want to open locations in poor neighborhoods, since people without disposable income are less likely to buy water ice. People in poor neighborhoods are also more likely to shoot each other. Foot Traffic More people around deters crime by increasing the number of potential witnesses. This could result in fewer shootings. It could also attract Rita's locations, since more people out walking means more potential customers. Reverse Causality A high rate of gun violence might cause a Rita's location to close. If this is the case, Rita's would disproportionately occupy safer neighborhoods, which it does.

Experimental Process Step 1. Download the 2022 data from the Philadelphia Office of the Controller website. Step 2. Manually enter the addresses off the Rita's website. Step 3. Attempt to use ArcGIS for the first time in a year, using your account from West Chester University. Step 4. Realize that WCU finally deleted your student account, but because you never got Martin to activate your Rutgers one, you can't run it on your computer. Step 5. Go to the Bloustein computer lab and log in at 7:30 pm on Sunday. Step 6. Have the computer shut off at 8:00 pm because Martin time restricted you to 8am to 8pm on weekends for "capacity", which is stupid because there are maximum like three other people in there. Step 7. Load the data into Google MyMaps and manually tally the shootings within half a mile.