Charm City Crimes

Gun offense records from Baltimore Maryland

Who is gun toting in Charm City?

The City of Baltimore Maryland, otherwise known as "Charm City" keeps tabs on gun offenders and released records relating to almost 3,000 offenders via Data.Gov. The site description explains that the dataset (download link) "represents the Gun Offender Registry for persons convicted of at least one gun-related offense and are required to register their name and address with police; also required to check-in with police every 6 months for three years".

To see what is "under the hood", the code is on GitHub: Guns of Charm City.

Please join me to explore some of the findings in a visual journey below.

Where do they live?

Use the timeline slider in the upper right hand corner of the map to see reported addresses for registered offenders over the last 13 years.

Demographic profile

Analysis shows that of the approximately 2750 offenders, 2,688 are male, the youngest 15, oldest 80 and a median age of 26. The majority identified as black.

Count by zipcode

The zipcodes with the highest counts of gun offender inhabitants are either approaching or tilt over the 200 count line. Moving the bubbles around in the visualization below will also display a tooltip with zipcode information

December 26

Initially, the scatter plot produced below suggested that the day after Christmas was a wild card for reported offenses, but on deeper inspection, this seems to only be true for the years of 2018 and 2019. Perhaps this reflects some reason related to a clerical issue, but it would be interesting to be able to find out why especially in light of the fact that this was only for two of 12 years that included Christmas (2021 Christmas has not happened as of the day of this writing). Maybe law enforcement increased neighborhood sweeps?

Graphing Districts by Year

Double click the legend on the right to isolate Districts for an analysis by year.

Covid related decline?

As seen in the chart below, a steady and then escalating increase in offenses drops precipitously right around the same time that the US went into lockdown due to the pandemic. If this is causational and not just a simple correlation, one has to wonder why. Was the reason economic? Did the supplemental unemployment benfits take a "bite out of crime"? Alternatively, was reporting and enforcement less robust because of government closures? It is also possible that with eateries, shopping centers and bars shut down there was simply less opportunity for folks to get into trouble. Perhaps all or some of those factors contributed to a decrease in firearm violations

Dreams of supplemental data

What little nuggets of insights could we get with more information? Unfortunately the nature of the offenses are not listed as part of this dataset. Are these simple gun possession violations or was a serious crime involved? Sex offender statistics, how funding is distributed in the community, educational access, employment statistics and proximity to to mental health services are only few potential resources that could help to "flesh out" the information gleaned during the analytical process that produced the above insights with the hope of telling a "human story" of "why" these crimes happened and "how" to fix it.