![]() ![]() Services and supports have been harder to deliver, and we know these programs play some role in preventing violence, so losing them may have contributed. Economic desperation causes stress and hopelessness, and traumatic experiences, like losing a loved one from COVID-19, could exacerbate the consequences of prior trauma, like childhood violence exposures. Jay: What we know about the consequences of the pandemic alone would be enough to explain a very large increase in gun violence. BU Today: After a quarter century of plunging crime rates, what’s your theory about the causes behind last year’s surge, and what policy responses do you think are needed? So when we set the cutoff at the top 50 cities, you get all the biggest cities-New York, LA, Chicago-down to Minneapolis and Wichita, with populations around 400,000. In the short term, we’ll be releasing a series of online tools that allow users to interact with the data-for example, to see what the gun violence curve for their city looks like-and posting these on the RISE Lab website.Įxcept in special cases, we’ve just set a cutoff based on total population. Those data aren’t perfect, but our analyses have found that they are quite good at detecting trends in gun violence over time and space. That led us to pull data from the Gun Violence Archive. Jay: Police departments collect data on gun violence in real time, but they aren’t required to report them to anybody, and only a few voluntarily release them to the public. BU Today: What was your methodology? What metric did you use to select cities for your studies? Our cities are racially segregated from decades of public policy that overtly and covertly aimed to maintain white dominance. We need to see that it’s not a coincidence that all of these burdens fall overwhelmingly on people of color, especially Black people. They’re also the most physically deteriorated and least conducive to community-building in shared spaces. But we also need to be able to see how gun violence is highly concentrated in neighborhoods with high rates of economic deprivation, trauma associated with past violence and now COVID, and poor access to resources. Those kinds of services have fallen off during the pandemic, which likely explains part of the violence rise. Resources and attention are critical because we have a pretty good toolbox of interventions for curbing gun violence. ![]() ![]() This was staggering, but we didn’t see it getting widespread attention outside of the communities most directly affected, predominantly people of color, who have suffered most during COVID-19. ![]() At the same time, gun violence rates began rising over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.ĭepending on how you calculate it, the gun homicide rate in US cities is likely to have increased by 35 to 40 percent from 2019 to 2020, which would be the biggest single-year increase on record. The idea is to help city officials and community members identify and prioritize those locations. Jay: In 2019, I developed a tool called Shape-Up, which combines machine learning and satellite imagery to identify the micro locations, like specific city blocks, that have the highest risk of gun violence incidence. BU Today: Why did you decide to study this topic? The $64,000 question: did the pandemic increase stress levels and violence or does the uptick in fatal shootings suggest we’re in for a long-term crime spree? Jay discussed his findings with BU Today. “ That’s 1,923 extra deaths in those cities alone,” tweeted gun violence researcher Jonathan Jay, a School of Public Health assistant professor of community health sciences. Jay, who analyzed the surge as the head of the SPH Research on Innovations for Safety and Equity (RISE) Lab, relied on data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks media and public reports of shooting incidents. While last year’s murder rate was far below the early ’90s peak, the 50 largest US cities by themselves had a 42 percent rise in fatal shootings. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Jayįor Americans old enough to remember, the drop in violent crime rates since the early 1990s- by between half and three quarters, depending on who’s counting-was cause for celebration. Jay developed technology to pinpoint areas at risk for gun violence, down to city blocks. ![]()
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