The State Of Gun Violence In The State of New York
The State Of Gun Violence In The State of New York
Taking a deep dive on declining gun violence in the Empire State.
Shooting data nationwide is usually pretty bad. Only a handful of agencies post aggregate figures, and Count Tyrone Rugen — the Six-Fingered Man from the Princess Bride — could probably count on one hand the number of agencies that provide incident-level data on shooting victims in anything approaching real-time.
It is instructive, therefore, to take a look at New York, a state where data is excellent, even if it is not fully clear just how representative New York’s gun violence trend is of the rest of the country.
There are two main data sources for evaluating gun violence trends in New York, and both point to rapidly declining shootings throughout the state.
GIVE
The Gun Involved Violence Elimination (GIVE) Initiative is described as an effort to provide “state funding to local law enforcement agencies for equipment, overtime, personnel, as well as focused training and technical assistance.” There are 20 New York police departments (NYPD is not one of them) that participate in GIVE plus a handful of other criminal justice agencies.
Most importantly for the purposes of this analysis is that the New York State Department Division of Criminal Justice Services has produced a monthly report of shooting victimization in GIVE agencies for many years. This allows for a reconstruction of long term shooting trends across over 20 agencies in a single state which is the only such collection of publicly available data that I’m aware of. These agencies account for about 80 percent of violent crime in New York outside of New York City per GIVE.
The trend in GIVE data is undeniably positive.
Shootings through June were down 25.7 percent in the GIVE agencies with the number of shooting victims down in 13 of the 20 agencies, even in 2, and up in 5. Even more impressively, shooting victimization was down through June in 11 of the 13 agencies which reported 10 or more shooting victims through June 2022.
Shooting victimization is down 49 percent in Buffalo, 26 percent in Rochester, and 19 percent in Syracuse.
Fewer people have been shot in 14 straight months relative to the same month the previous year in agencies measured by GIVE.
The change in gun violence in Buffalo is particularly impressive with the city having exactly as many shooting victims over the last 12 months as were recorded in 2019 despite having had a massive surge in gun violence beginning in mid-2020.
New York City
The data from the GIVE agencies cover less than half of the people that are shot in the state each year. Most of the rest of the shooting victims are in New York City.
NYPD does not participate in GIVE but the department does publish crime statistics weekly and shooting victim data on a quarterly basis.
The below graph shows the impressive decline in gun violence in New York City since peaking in 2021. Shooting victims were down 32 percent in the first half of 2023 relative to the first half of 2021 and trending lower. There were, however, still about 40 percent more shooting victims in the first half of 2023 than there were in the first half of 2018.
Is New York Representative?
Taken together, these two data sources cover the vast majority of people shot in New York this year. If GIVE represents 80 percent of statewide shooting victims outside of New York (assuming GIVE’s assertion is correct and applies to gun violence similarly to how it applies to violent crime) then some back-of-the-napkin math suggests that GIVE and NYPD’s data cover about 90 percent of all shootings in New York. This level of coverage is terrific from a data perspective, probably the only state in the country with this much readily available shooting data.
What is unfortunately not fully clear yet is the degree to which the breadth of declining gun violence in New York will be followed in states across the country.
Consider Mississippi. I downloaded data from the Gun Violence Archive of shootings in Mississippi for the below graph of shooting victims rolling over 12 months. Separating Jackson from the rest of the state suggests the gun violence trend in Mississippi’s largest city is diverging from the rest of the state.
The story for most of New York is a positive one in terms of falling gun violence though there is much to learn about gun violence nationwide in 2023. The full trend is not yet clear and it remains to be seen whether shootings will continue falling, plateau, or even start rising again.
Time — and better data — will tell.