It’s a regular struggle on the gun violence beat to find good data that’s up-to-date and comprehensive — a reality we frequently cover on this page.
A recent webinar from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center laid out several useful tips and sources for good gun violence data.
The webinar, “Digging into crime data to inform news coverage across beats,” included Jeffrey A. Butts, a research professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and executive director of the John Jay Research and Evaluation Center; Mensah M. Dean, a staff writer at The Trace; and George LeVines, the editor of The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub. The discussion was moderated by Clark Merrefield, senior editor for economics and legal systems at The Journalist’s Resource.
The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub
LeVines walked through The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub. (We recently did a Q&A with the data journalist working on the Data Hub.)
It has three components:
- The help desk is an open resource that anyone (journalists, researchers, readers, etc.) can use to ask The Trace questions.
- The resource page offers guides for reporters looking to replicate The Trace’s reporting at the local level.
- The data library has 21 data sets covering a wide range of topics, such as youth gun deaths, federal immigration agent shootings, mass shootings, firearm sales, pregnancy gun deaths, gun violence trends for 150 U.S. cities, and more. The data library, LeVines explained, is modeled after government open data portals but is designed to be more user friendly. The data sets are updated at different intervals — either daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly.
Gun violence research once again lags
Butts, of John Jay, also discussed the state of federally funded gun violence research. Since President Donald Trump returned to office, millions of dollars in funding for gun violence research has disappeared.
“The state of federally sponsored gun research is really poor right now,” Butts said. “There are a lot of committed researchers still endeavoring to shed light on this problem and find effective solutions. So the workforce has not gone away, but the support for it has been slashed badly.”
Butts said his colleagues at the John Jay Research and Evaluation Center and other institutions lost some funding they’d been awarded or had to make do with less funding than they’d applied to receive.
And applying for funding has become even more competitive, he added. He’s heard stories of funders putting out requests for proposals and getting many more applications than previously.
“Fewer people are being awarded funds, fewer studies are going on, which is a burden on the non-federal sector,” Butts said. “So projects and research funded by foundations and by state and local governments have become more important now, and we hope that that keeps up.”
Dean, who reports from Philadelphia for The Trace, shared what that loss of funding for violence prevention is like on the local level.
The city’s mayor and city council “still don’t know if they’re going to get all of the federal grant money that the city relies on, which is about $2 billion,” Dean said.
He also heard directly from violence prevention groups that lost funding and are in the process of appealing. But the appeals process is complicated and murky, they told Dean, so they don’t know if they’ll be able to get their funding back.
Federal data that’s still reliable and available
LeVines with The Trace did point to a couple silver linings on the federal data front. Two critical data sets from the CDC remain available: the WONDER dataset and the violent death dashboard.
WONDER is “the census of our vital statistics in the country,” LeVines said. It includes gun deaths by suicide, by homicide and other categories.
The other set, the violent death dashboard, was released just before Trump returned to office. That set covers gun homicides, suicides and overdoses.
“We quickly grabbed that thinking it was going to go offline as soon as the new administration came in. And that didn’t happen. In fact, we kind of accidentally realized that it had been updated since that launch,” LeVines said.
Dean also ran through some useful avenues for data:
- Local police and sheriff departments
- Local prosecutors (sometimes called district attorneys or state’s attorneys)
- The Washington Post’s police shooting tracker (Though the newspaper appears to have stopped updating it, but it remains online and covers nearly a decade of violence.)
- Bowling Green University’s police misconduct tracker, which includes shootings
- The Gun Violence Archive
- Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence
