Abstract
Reginald A. Byron on the daily rhythms of urban shootings.
Urban America was inundated by a surge of everyday shootings during the COVID-19 pandemic and, despite noteworthy declines, is still plagued by significant post-pandemic gun violence. Studies of such shootings are abundant. Much of this work, like researchers John MacDonald, George Mohler, and P. Jeffrey Brantingham’s 2022 article on shooting hotspots in the journal Preventive Medicine, finds that shootings are spatially segregated within urban areas of concentrated disadvantage. That is, small percentages of disadvantaged and clustered block groups account for far disproportionate amounts of the total shootings throughout a city. Research further shows that urban shootings are statistically more likely to occur at night and on the weekends (see the work of public health scholars like Elizabeth B. Klerman and co-authors’ 2024 article on the temporal patterns of gun violence in the Journal of Biological Rhythms). These collective findings are generally explained with criminological frameworks like Lawrence E. Cohen and Marcus Felson’s (1979) routine activity theory, which maintains that crimes will be most prevalent when motivated offenders converge with suitable targets in the absence of capable guardians. Given such robust empirical work and its attributed theoretical underpinnings, it might be tempting to assume that we fully understand the “where” and “when” of urban shootings and can close the book.
Urban Shootings by Location (n=14,716)
Web Sources: Chicago Data Portal. 2024. “Violence Reduction-Victims of Homicides and Non-Fatal Shootings.” Dallas Police Department. 2024. “Police Incidents.” Los Angeles Police Department. 2024. “Crime Data from 2020 to Present.” NYC OpenData. 2024. “NYPD Shooting Incident Data (Historic).” Open Baltimore. 2024. “Part 1 Crime Data.”
However, recent studies, like criminal justice scholars Jaclyn Schildkraut and colleagues’ 2022 article on understanding mass public shootings in the journal Homicide Studies, suggest that the timing of gun violence varies by location because the locations themselves have different daily rhythms. Investigating whether this is true across more commonplace everyday shootings remains a worthwhile endeavor.
To do so, I draw on open access police department data from five large U.S. cities in different regions of the country (Baltimore, Maryland; Chicago, Illinois; Dallas, Texas; Los Angeles, California; and New York City, New York). Despite possible slippage in the data as cases move through intricate criminal justice classification processes, these often-used datasets are among the fullest publicly available resources published by local police departments in the United States. The five cities were chosen because their datasets provide public access to victim-level fatal and non-fatal shooting incidents, including the day, time, and locations where gunshot injuries occurred. My primary goal is to examine how the temporal patterns of everyday shootings from 2022 and 2023 and in these five locations (n=14,716) might vary across urban space.
Temporal Distribution of Urban Shootings by Location
Web Sources: Chicago Data Portal. 2024. “Violence Reduction-Victims of Homicides and Non-Fatal Shootings.” Dallas Police Department. 2024. “Police Incidents.” Los Angeles Police Department. 2024. “Crime Data from 2020 to Present.” NYC OpenData. 2024. “NYPD Shooting Incident Data (Historic).” Open Baltimore. 2024. “Part 1 Crime Data.”
Of the ten most common gun violence locations, shootings that take place on the street account for the lion’s share (66.8%) of all shootings during this period, followed by shootings that occur inside or immediately outside of residences (15.12%) and those in parking lots (4.91%). Other less common locations (e.g., parks, gas stations, and bars) each account for under 2% of the total (see p. 59). Aligned with routine-activity theory as well as weekend socialization patterns, Saturdays and Sundays are the most common days for urban shootings in the aggregate (see above). Indeed, over 36% of those shot on the street, 40% of those shot in parking lots, and 45% of those shot in parks were wounded or killed on these two days alone. Given that many of these outdoor violent crimes happen late at night (between midnight and 3am), capable guardianship is also likely limited because of a decrease in the density of those who might intervene or serve as possible witnesses. Upon deeper investigation, these open access police data also reveal that 11% of grocery or convenience store based shootings took place between 9pm and midnight on Sunday and more than a quarter (almost 28%) of those shot in or near bars or nightclubs were shot on early Sunday mornings between midnight and 3am. Such temporal specificity could benefit businesses and local police departments as they devise plans to allocate resources toward curbing gun violence.
Location-specific plans to stretch limited gun violence prevention resources across the week could be beneficial.
iStockPhoto.com // BCFC
If we were to end the discussion here, though, we’d miss many of the subtleties of everyday urban shootings. For example, there are two exceptions to the night and weekend prevalence of most urban shootings. Shootings in commercial buildings or warehouses are most likely to occur on Thursdays and restaurant-based shootings are most likely to occur on Fridays. Although these two establishment types have atypical gun violence peaks, their patterns still seem to fit a routine activity-theory based prediction about the convergence of motivated offenders and suitable targets. Because most commercial buildings or warehouses have limited staff or are closed on the weekends, gun violence in these settings should naturally be more common during the week (albeit the greater frequency specifically on Thursdays is a meaningful finding). In contrast, Friday is a popular day for Americans to eat out at restaurants and this could create a situation where suitable targets increasingly encounter motivated offenders. Yet, the disaggregated result revealing that noon to 3pm is the most common time for Thursday-based commercial building shootings and Friday-based restaurant shootings complicates our understanding of the “when” of gun violence. These shootings are overrepresented during daylight hours and around lunchtime, when capable guardians should be available. A full 16% of restaurant-based shootings in this sample, in fact, occurred within this brief three-hour window of time. Such a trend does not neatly align with routine activity theory. Future studies should re-assess whether these intriguing patterns hold after analyses of more complete police data from a broader array of cities.
Other locations seem to have temporal patterns that also vary somewhat from the predicted night and weekend presumption. Gas stations, for example, are sites of shootings which are spread more sporadically throughout the week—the most prevalent day being Sunday, followed by Tuesday and then Friday. Moreover, residential shootings are overrepresented on Mondays (15.33%, compared to the 14.3% we would expect if each day of the week had an equal representation). And the single most prevalent three-hour period of shootings at parks or playgrounds (8.7%) falls on Tuesdays between 6pm to 9pm. The distinctive timing of shootings in these locations suggests that we need more nuance in the ways we educate others about the “when” of gun violence and that location-specific plans to stretch limited gun violence prevention resources across the week could be pro-actively beneficial.
My descriptive analyses add needed locational complexity to our discussions about the temporal patterns of everyday urban shootings. The visualization on p. 60 displays the temporal patterning of urban gun violence at ten locations, revealing that assumptions about an unwavering night-and-weekend arrangement to gun violence across urban space are too simplistic. Much like other outbreaks, understanding these specific timing patterns is arguably one of the first steps to any public health approaches to gun violence. More precise investigations of the spatio-temporal configurations of daily urban gun violence can also offer the most practical information to those who work to reduce gun violence across different urban spaces.