The Standard Journal

Data helps chart teenage gun violence in the US

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The Associated Press and USA TODAY Network found that even among cities with high levels of gun violence, these are the few where the teen hazard rate stands out.

To examine the issue of youth gun violence, the reporters used data from the Gun Violence Archive to isolate incidents in which a minor age 12 to 17 was either killed or injured. The incidents were aggregated at a city level and then measured against the population in that age group to derive a “hazard rate” — the percentage of minors ages 12 to 17 in the city injured or killed in gun violence each year.

The population figures for 12- to 17- year- olds were based on 2010 U.S. Census Bureau estimates for legally incorporat­ed “Place” entities. The incident data from the Gun Violence Archive was collected through that organizati­on’s monitoring of media and police reports across the country.

GVA is a nonpartisa­n, nonprofit organizati­on that catalogues incidents of gun crime across the United States. The data used i n t he analysis spans 3½ years, from the start of 2014 through June 30, 2017.

The AP and USA TODAY Network analysis found that with the exception of Chicago, the cities with the highest youth hazard rates were nearly all similar in size — with population­s of 50,000 to 500,000, based on 2016 Census population estimates.

The analysis f ound there are a half-dozen cities with particular­ly high youth hazard rates: Wilmington, Delaware; Chicago; Savannah, Georgia; Trenton, New Jersey; New Orleans; and Syracuse, New York. Wilmington, in particular, had a youth hazard rate nearly double that of any other city. Several other smaller and mid- sized cities also showed high levels of teenage gun violence, but the rates began to level out after the top six.

Smaller cities naturally show higher variation than larger cities, but these six municipali­ties had such outsize youth hazard rates compared to others that it was clear teenage gun violence was a problem. The AP and USA TODAY Network analysis also tested the youth hazard rate against the adult hazard rate to make sure the youth rate was unusually high, instead of just being a result of GVA’s data-collection quality in certain cities.

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