Skip to content

Latest

Keep up with the most recent developments from the Gun Violence Data Hub. Here you’ll find links to partner stories, new dataset announcements, issues of our newsletter, and more!

Behind the Stories: NBC News4, shootings near schools

By Ava SasaniPublished December 18, 2024

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:

  1. Have school-adjacent shootings spiked in my city or state over the past decade?
  2. Is my city or state a national outlier?
  3. 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.

newsletter

Stay up to date with the latest from the Gun Violence Data Hub.

Sign up

Behind the Stories: Verite News, Police Use of Force

By George LeVinesPublished December 12, 2024

Update 12/18/24: Verite Editor in Chief Terry Baquet highlighted this collaboration in his year-end note to supporters.

On Halloween 2024, Verite News in New Orleans published a story that marked the first Gun Violence Data Hub collaboration, “New Orleans police say their use of force data shows no racial disparities. We checked the numbers.

The story materialized after several months of on-and-off collaboration, all while Trace staff worked on building the Data Hub. We want to share the details of how we chose Verite News as an initial collaborator and what work went into the story from both newsrooms. We hope that by showing how the sausage gets made, others will understand what a Data Hub collaboration looks and feels like. We have a help desk, please reach out.

On Halloween 2024, Verite News in New Orleans published a story that marked the first Gun Violence Data Hub collaboration, “New Orleans police say their use of force data shows no racial disparities. We checked the numbers.

The story materialized after several months of on-and-off collaboration, all while Trace staff worked on building the Data Hub. We want to share the details of how we chose Verite News as an initial collaborator and what work went into the story from both newsrooms. We hope that by showing how the sausage gets made, others will understand what a Data Hub collaboration looks and feels like. We have a help desk, please reach out.

The decisions

The Data Hub evaluates collaborations with particular emphasis on two variables: local gun violence rates and news desert status. In other words, we want to be helpful in places where it matters. New Orleans has one of the highest gun violence rates in the country.

The word “rate” is important. Focusing exclusively on areas with a high number of shootings means looking only at the nation’s population centers. As The Trace reported earlier this year, gun violence is up everywhere over the past decade: from areas with towns of fewer than 10,000 residents to the country’s megalopolises. We’ll be working well beyond city limits.

The issue of news deserts is a well-identified problem in the industry. The decline of local news institutions over the past several decades means residents don’t have access to the same quality of information, and local public officials and offices aren’t held to the same standards. Several news operations have formed programs to counter this decline, including the New York Times, ProPublica, the Marshall Project, the Associated Press, and Stanford University’s Big Local News.

Count the Data Hub in!

We’re also making a lot of decisions behind the scenes about what data to prioritize for our Spring 2025 data library launch.

We’ve been hard at work getting access to data that’s typically reserved for university researchers and scholars. And already we’ve had industry insiders and government officials reach out to us, wanting to share data.

Amazing! But we’re a four-person team and need to triage what data to process, analyze, and publish. Right now it’s gun deaths all the way down to the county level, intimate partner homicide, and two school-related datasets.

With data in hand, how do we use it to tell stories?

newsletter

Stay up to date with the latest from the Gun Violence Data Hub.

Sign up

The work

Staff from Verite News and The Trace met at the summer 2024 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference.

After an initial call introducing the Data Hub and exploring Verite’s hopes for gun violence coverage in New Orleans, our research editor here at the Data Hub responded with a memo suggesting several story options. Police use of force became the focus.

The two organizations met virtually on a semi-regular basis, the Data Hub working from New York City on analyzing New Orleans Police Department use of force data, and Verite reporting the subject on the ground locally.

In October, the Data Hub submitted a findings and methods report to Verite. Verite used the report to further its news gathering and weave data into the story. It also had the analysis vetted by subject matter experts, who were able to comment on the findings, and used the document to ask government officials pointed questions about the ongoing trends.

Among the findings were three key facts:

More than 40% of NOPD use of force incidents involved guns.
In each year from 2016 through 2023, Black people accounted for more than 80% of uses of force.
Since 2016, nearly 88% of NOPD use of force incidents in which at least one police firearm was used involved Black civilians, compared to about 8% for white civilians.

Verite News ultimately mixed Data Hub findings into a narrative that examined government reports, cited public officials, advocates and experts, and followed an individual’s personal violent encounter with law enforcement.

“The response has been uniformly complimentary,” Verite Managing Editor Charles Maldonado said in an email.

Neither the city nor the NOPD disputed the reporting, according to Maldonado.

The future

This story exemplifies the kind of collaboration we’re striving for at the Gun Violence Data Hub. We have a long list of potential collaborators; so don’t be surprised if you hear from someone on the team in the coming months.

The Data Hub is also interested in establishing research partnerships with other well-resourced newsrooms and academic institutions to improve our ability to tackle the overwhelming task of providing the most comprehensive gun violence data repository in the U.S.

We’re truly an open door. That’s why we’ve set up the help desk. No question is too small or too big.

If you’re a reporter or editor looking to start or improve gun violence reporting in your area, we have three data journalists at the ready and a deeply engaged managing editor backing us. If you are interested in a research partnership, we’d love to know more about your questions and ambitions. Either way, please reach out!

Contact the help desk …

Help Desk
  • More than 40% of New Orleans Police Department use of force incidents involved guns.
  • In each year from 2016 through 2023, Black people accounted for more than 80% of uses of force.
  • Since 2016, nearly 88% of NOPD use of force incidents in which at least one police firearm was used involved Black civilians, compared to about 8% for white civilians.

How The Trace Localizes Gun Violence Data

By Team TracePublished October 28, 2024
  • Four examples of gun violence data localized and the associated impact.
  • What the data the Hub is working on currently.

The Gun Violence Data Hub’s core mission includes being a resource to local newsrooms. We’re especially interested in under-resourced coverage areas and places with particularly high rates of gun violence.

We’re taking action with the launch of our help desk and resources page, and in Spring 2025 we’ll officially launch our data library.

But The Trace has been localizing gun violence data well before the Hub’s inception. Our reporting on topics including road rage gun violence, school-adjacent shootings, small towns and rural areas, and our Atlas of American Gun Violence have all been repurposed or cited by local newsrooms throughout the country to shed light on this public health crisis endemic to the U.S.

The atlas enables an overview of fatal and nonfatal shootings, visually demonstrating the relative infrequency of mass shootings despite their outsized impact on the zeitgeist. It lets local reporters familiar with their surrounding geography immediately see which neighborhoods are most impacted. In the view from Rochester, New York, below, the empty bubble to the south that surrounds University of Rochester is evident to anyone familiar with the city.

 

A screenshot of The Trace's Atlas of Gun Violence, zoomed to Rochester, New York.
The Trace’s Atlas of American Gun Violence shows the distribution of shootings across Rochester, New York. Screenshot/The Trace

In March, The Trace published a story with a headline that challenged common wisdom: “You’re More Likely to Be Shot in Selma Than in Chicago”. Several local newsrooms cited our story in their own reporting, including MinnPost, Dallas Weekly, and Chicago Public Square.

The story explored the prevalence and growth of gun violence in America’s smaller towns and rural areas over the last 10 years — a period that ended with a decline in firearm casualties in our largest cities, but a sustained increase in less-populated areas.

Reporters found cities of fewer than 250,000 people in the South collectively experiencing a perilous upward gun violence trend, while overall their counterparts in the West, Midwest and Northeast saw much more modest increases.

Later this fall, the NBC News4 investigative team in Washington, D.C., will use our data on school-adjacent shootings to examine the impact on students and racial disparities among those affected. In our national story, Trace reporters identified the district as a place with a stark racial divide when it came to gun violence near public K-12 schools.

Our road rage coverage has been cited by 48 TV and radio stations, newspapers, and digital newsrooms spanning 24 states. The Trace’s national analysis identified Houston as the city with the highest number of road rage shootings, and five newsrooms there — Fox Houston, Axios Houston, KHOU, Houston Public Media, and the Houston Chronicle — cited our story in their coverage of the issue.

This spring, when we launch our data library, reporters and the public will have easy access to cleaned and localized data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The CDC’s WONDER database is a rich resource of vital statistics for the country, including coroner reported gun deaths from every state. But the website is clunky and we’re working to make the information easier to access for the average reporter.

ATF, meanwhile, helpfully separates its gun trace statistics by U.S. states and territories. But in some cases it’s useful to recombine those different tables. And currently they’re only available as HTML elements or formatted Excel files — neither of which are particularly useful for data analysis.

This is all just the start. The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub aims to become the most comprehensive data resource on the subject in the US; and we can’t do it without you. We want to know what you want to know. Please reach out to us via our help desk or at [email protected] with any questions, ideas, feedback or criticism.

We’re ready to help!