Murder in the Hood
In my last post, I mentioned in 2021, there was a murder at the McDonald’s across the street from where I live. This morning, I was grazing on Twitter when I came across a tweet by Peter Moskos linking to the Trace, an amazing interactive website that shows on a map where all the reported gun violence happened in the U.S. If you type in your address, it will how you a map of all the shootings and gun murders within a mile of your location between 2014 and 2022. You can zoom in and out, and change the date rage by year. I moved into this building at the end of 2018, so I was curious about the gan deaths in my neighborhood in that period.
So ten deaths by guns within a few blocks of the home of The Great God Pan is Dead in the past 5 years.
The murder at the McDonalds happened in 2021. Here’s what the Trace records happening in 2021.
2021 was a lethal year for the hood.
How was last year?
This seems the opposite of the current narrative that crime is exploding (at least within a few blocks of my home). I don’t have any explanation nor even a wild-ass theory why shootings went down here between 2021 and 2022.
As long as I’m here, I want to recomend reading Peter Moskos’s 2008 book, Cop in the Hood. Moskos is a sociologist who joined the Baltimore PD as a deeply involved kind of field research. Cop in the Hood is kind of a non-fiction version of The Wire. So much of the critique of policing in The Wire is present in Cop in the Hood. One could assume that Wire creator David Simon read the book before writing the series, but the series mostly preceeded the book. Both the series and Moskos’s book are excellent.
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