Last week I posted on Chicago’s safest and most dangerous neighborhoods based on the murder rate. Although that’s a pretty popular way for people to make a determination of a neighborhood’s relative safety it’s actually a pretty narrow definition. A lot of bad things an happen to people without them getting murdered. For instance, they can get shot which will seriously mess them up even if they don’t die.
Therefore, people tend to really fixate on shootings and it has become another common and popular way for people to assess neighborhood safety in Chicago. As I will discuss in a later blog post this is also a fairly narrow view of neighborhood safety but because it’s a really popular measure I decided to take a look at the 2487 non-fatal shootings that took place in the 12 months ending June 2017.
Note: This data is taken from the City of Chicago Data Portal and I believe that shootings are classified in the database as aggravated battery with a handgun or other firearm.
Shooting Rate By Chicago Neighborhood
As I did last week I aggregated the data by community area (which, again, I loosely refer to as neighborhoods) and then calculated the rate per 100,000 residents. The graph below ranks these Chicago neighborhoods from lowest to highest and if you just click on it once it will expand and you’ll be able to scroll through it.
There are a few interesting observations:
- Several community areas had absolutely no shootings or very few.
- Lincoln Park actually had slightly more than other areas which are obviously lower income than Lincoln Park
- West Town and Logan Square had higher rates than Uptown, Rogers Park, Portage Park, and Edgewater
Map of Chicago Shootings
I also mapped out the shootings over the last 12 months below. The map is interactive so you can pan and zoom, you can open a full page version of the map, you can share it, and you can click on each of the balloons to get more information on the shooting.
Once you zoom in and out and pan around a bit you can get a much better sense of where the safest and most dangerous neighborhoods are based upon where shootings have taken place. Within a community area shooting activity can vary greatly from one block to the next so you can’t paint the entire community area with a broad brush. West Town is a great example of this as most of the shootings occur in a few pockets.
As with the murders, there are similar patterns of where shootings take place – such as west of Western/ south of North Ave., Pilsen and on the south side with the exceptions of Bridgeport, McKinley Park and Hyde Park.
#ChicagoCrime #ChicagoShootings #Chiraq
Gary Lucido is the President of Lucid Realty, the Chicago area’s full service discount real estate brokerage. If you want to keep up to date on the Chicago real estate market, get an insider’s view of the seamy underbelly of the real estate industry, or you just think he’s the next Kurt Vonnegut you can Subscribe to Getting Real by Email using the form below. Please be sure to verify your email address when you receive the verification notice.