Behind the Stories: NBC News4, shootings near schools
In December 2024, NBC News4 in Washington, D.C., aired a segment about the toll of gun violence on the district’s youngest residents. This digital and broadcast story is a collaboration between the News4 investigative team and The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub
Our partnership began in June 2024, when we received a note from Ted Oberg – an investigative journalist at News4 – asking about the availability of data on young victims of gun violence.
That same month, The Trace’s data editor, Olga Pierce, uncovered a chilling statistic: over the past decade, there were at least 188,000 shootings within 500 yards of a K-12 school, an average of 57 shootings per day.The district’s Dunbar High School saw 132 nearby shootings between 2014 and 2023.
At the Data Hub, we wanted to know, is Dunbar an outlier? How many other district schools saw over 100 nearby shootings in the past decade? Pierce’s nationwide analysis gave us the contours of a story that could be set in D.C., but we needed more data and sourcing to move forward.
Together, News4 and the Data Hub began working to understand how shootings near Washington’s public and charter schools affect the lives of families in the nation’s capital.
Washington audiences thanked the News4 I-team for the story, with one viewer noting the importance of recognizing “the impact trauma has on learning, on our everyday lives, and just being a kid!”
Another viewer remarked on the “disturbing and disappointing data” at the center of the investigation.
The story also attracted a broad audience on social media. The local station’s TikTok post summarizing the results of our investigation racked up nearly 30,000 views in its first few days online.
Here’s how our two newsrooms created the final story, “I tell her it’s fireworks”: How DC shootings affected 564 of 566 schools.
The decisions
There’s not a lot of publicly available, reliable data on American gun violence. That’s part of why the Data Hub was formed, and why our team is currently working to access data that’s typically reserved for university researchers and scholars. Our own data library, slated to launch in spring 2025, will include gun violence information shared with us by industry insiders and government officials.
In the meantime, one of the resources that Trace staffers often turn to is the Gun Violence Archive, or GVA, an independent nonprofit that collects data from more than 7,500 law enforcement, media, government, and commercial sources daily.
Earlier this year, Trace staffers Pierce, Jennifer Mascia, and Mensah M. Dean used GVA data for a national story on school-adjacent shootings, mapping out the gun violence that unfolds within earshot of K-12 students across the U.S. The team identified the district as an example of a broader, national trend: Black and brown students are more likely to attend besieged schools with high numbers of nearby shootings.
The Data Hub shared this insight with the News4 I-team after an initial introductory meeting at the summer 2024 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference.
The option to localize The Trace’s school-adjacent shooting story was offered to News4 in a memorandum written by Data Hub staffers. The memorandum included a short list of other data story options about gun violence in the district, but News4 opted to start with school-adjacent shootings.
The GVA data pulled and cleaned by Pierce offered an existing treasure trove of information that our teams could rely on.
The work
In October, the Data Hub submitted a findings and methods report to News4. News4 used the report to inform its news gathering. You can access our report here.
Among the findings were three key facts:
- Gun violence near Washington, D.C.’s public and charter schools doubled since 2014, outpacing other U.S. cities like Milwaukee, Memphis, Detroit, and Atlanta.
- Since 2017, school-adjacent shootings have declined in Baltimore while Washington experienced an overall rise.
- The 10 district public schools with the most shootings nearby all have majority Black student populations. Ketcham Elementary School topped the list with a whopping 195 nearby shootings in the past decade.
The News4 I-team used its extensive network of local sources to interview the children and parents who live in neighborhoods with high rates of school-adjacent shootings. The team’s work leading this story is a reminder of one of the caveats outlined in our guide to best practices in gun violence reporting – respect the people behind the numbers. Localizing shooting data falls short without on-the-ground reporting by local newsrooms like the News4 I-team, which collected stories from district families about protecting their children from the sights and sounds of shootings.
The joint investigation was cited by the NBC affiliate’s breaking-news team just one week after publication, when a 17-year-old girl was fatally shot near Dunbar High School. Our data analysis identified Dunbar as one of the district campuses most affected by the nearby gun violence, enduring 132 nearby shootings in the past decade. Breaking-news reporter Carissa DiMargo wove that statistic into her coverage of the shooting, offering News4 readers added context about the incident.
The future
Are you part of a local newsroom interested in information on school-adjacent shootings? We’re here to help.
First, check out the June 2024 investigation that started it all. The story features our nationwide map, built with Mapbox, where you can look up a school in your area to see the nearby shootings that took place between 2014 and 2023.
If you want to learn more about school-adjacent shootings in your city or state, reach out to the help desk. We’re actively looking for more local newsrooms to partner with, so please contact us to take full advantage of our database. Here are a few examples of questions we can help your newsroom explore:
- Have school-adjacent shootings spiked in my city or state over the past decade?
- Is my city or state a national outlier?
- Are shootings in my city clustered around specific schools or neighborhoods?
We try our best to answer any and all questions that our collaborator newsrooms raise throughout the reporting process.
If you’re a reporter or editor looking to start or improve gun violence reporting in your area, we have a team of data journalists ready and excited to work with you. Check out our inaugural collaboration with New Orleans’ Verite News for another example of what The Data Hub can help your newsroom do.
If you’d like to hear more about other collaborations or future work we’re doing for the data library, please sign up for our newsletter.