Hot spots: NYPD data shows most shootings occur on the same blocks, year after year

As children played at the Hilltop Playground in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, early one June morning, a stark reminder of violence was visible nearby.

The green turf field was empty, save for TV news crews, whose cameras were pointed at several pairs of Crocs on the ground.

The shoes remained from the previous night, when stray bullets wounded Ruanna Brown, 9, and her cousin, Empress Alexander Davis, 11, as they played on the field.

“It's been going on for years since I was a kid,” said Brown’s mother, Melissa Alexander, who grew up in the neighborhood. “I mean, I could talk ‘til I'm blue in the face. What's gonna happen? I want to see change. I'm hoping change comes soon.”

Brown returned home from the hospital the next day with a bullet wound in her knee. Davis, who’d been shot in her back, was still being treated.

“Could y'all stop the violence? I don't know. It's just, it's ridiculous. It's horrible. I'm lost for words,” Alexander said.

Neighbors said the shootings spilled over from the nearby intersection of Dean Street and Howard Avenue, where at least 11 people have been injured by gunfire from 2020 to June of this year.

Gothamist analyzed city shootings during that window because it reveals the latest patterns of gun violence in New York City – from a spike in shootings during the pandemic to the gradual decrease the city has experienced over the last two years. The analysis shows there are eight other city blocks where 10 or more people were fatally shot or wounded during that same time period. Gothamist found that in many cases, the same blocks where shootings were concentrated — known as hot spots — had the most shootings year after year.

Gothamist’s analysis of New York City shootings is the first to examine four years of verified gun violence incidents from the NYPD’s Open Data portal, which includes precise details about where and when a shooting occurred, the age and race of the victims, and whether or not the shooting was fatal. The data is far more comprehensive than the department’s CompStat website, and provides a uniquely detailed view of where shootings cluster and how gun violence patterns have played out since the pandemic. The NYPD’s CompStat website does not distinguish between fatal and nonfatal shootings, does not name victims or suspects, and does not include police-involved shootings.

To determine how many New Yorkers have died by gunfire in 2024, Gothamist compiled its own list of incidents based on individual police reports, which usually provide the names, ages and addresses of both victims and suspects along with precise information about the time and location of each shooting. By analyzing each individual fatality and layering that data over the numbers from the last four years, Gothamist’s map goes beyond the numbers to highlight the human toll of gun violence in each community.

The map was built in collaboration with Chris Herrmann and Fritz Umbach, criminology and data experts from CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. They helped verify and clean the data of repeats or overlapping incidents. The resulting map shows how shootings have remained prevalent and persistent in very few and specific areas, even as gun violence decreases citywide.

Along with the stubborn persistence of these gun violence hot spots, the data also shows that gun violence is mostly contained to the same small areas over time. Just 4% of New York City’s 120,000 blocks – defined as a street segment between two intersections – account for nearly all of the city’s shootings, according to the data.

Life even two or three blocks away from these nine hot spots can be dramatically different, with less violence, fewer crimes and residents who say they feel relatively safe.

Gothamist visited the hot spots and surrounding blocks identified in the analysis and spent months with residents, families, police officers, anti-violence groups and crime experts to learn why the same blocks experience a high number of shootings year after year.

Different block, vastly different perceptions

The stretch of Sterling Place between Rochester and Buffalo avenues in Crown Heights has been the site of 12 shootings since 2020. At least five were fatal.

Tyquan Howard was 16 when he collapsed on the block after being shot in the back in May 2020. He was taken to Brookdale Hospital for surgery, but didn’t survive.

On a recent visit to her old neighborhood, Howard’s mother Gail said she thinks her son’s death resulted from a conflict between residents on Sterling Place and the sprawling 1,200-unit Albany Houses complex four blocks away. The NYPD said most of the shootings on the block in the last four years have involved 16- to 20-year-olds from the Stain and Albany crews – two small gangs with ties to the area.

“We raise our kids to, you know, do good things, and then they get around people that do bad things and then they get caught in the crossfire,” she said.

While Howard and her family have moved away from Sterling Place, Lisa Conyers, 57, still lives on the block. Five people from her building have been shot — three of them fatally — in just the last four years.

Conyers said she won’t let relatives visit her at home.

“My nieces and nephews, no,” she said, sitting in the courtyard where some candles remained from a memorial to 26-year-old Shaheim Rogers , who was shot and killed in August 2023. “I don’t want nobody to get hurt. You don’t know who’s gonna walk through that gate.”

As an example of how concentrated much of the city’s violence is, residents living just two blocks away had a much different perception of safety on their street. On Sterling Place and Utica Avenue, 58-year-old Francine Doyle sat on a folding chair, eating Chinese food and cracking jokes in the shade with her neighbor, 73-year-old Brenda Morris.

“Yeah, we stay out ‘til like 9, 10 o'clock. I relax, we just talk, laugh. This block is a very safe block,” Doyle said.

Though the map shows two shootings occurred on Doyle and Morris’ block in the last four years, both had drastically different feelings about the risks they faced compared to their neighbors living just two blocks east, where Howard was shot.

The same dichotomy was clear where the two children were shot at the Hilltop Playground. The day after the shooting, Elsa Avril, 43, was busy tending to a plot in a community vegetable garden located just minutes away on Bergen Street between Saratoga and Howard avenues.

“I never experienced any kind of gun violence in this area, on this block, especially on this block,” Avril said.

Gothamist’s analysis shows that nobody was shot there within the last four years.

Generational hot spots

While Gothamist’s analysis examines the last four years, experts say many of the hot spots have been around for much longer.

“Generations come and generations go, but the concentrations of violence are largely static,” said Elizabeth Glazer, the founder of Vital City, an organization that studies the patterns of gun violence. “Of the top 10 precincts for shootings, seven out of the 10 of them have been the same for 30 years.”

She pointed to a variety of social factors that exacerbate gun violence.

“The amount of social distress in those neighborhoods is reflected in the violence, but also in unemployment, low birth weight, high asthma,” Glazer said. “Every aspect of physical and material life is poorer than it is in other parts of the city where gun violence is so much less of an issue.”

Criminologists say a block or corner can become a theater for violence when those issues of poverty combine with certain types of infrastructure. Courtyards, basketball courts, bodegas, parks, liquor stores and smoke shops have also been repeat scenes of shootings.

Experts from John Jay, Columbia University and elsewhere say it’s not desolate areas that are the scenes of most shootings — just the opposite.

“For a lot of neighborhoods, it's the one place where people congregate,” said Charles Branas, an epidemiology professor at Columbia who studies the interactions between shootings and physical city spaces. “Stuff just doesn't go well at midnight and 1 in the morning because there are guns and because there are substances being used.”

Many of the city's worst spots are in or near New York City Housing Authority complexes, though not all complexes have acute levels of violence. Police officials, criminologists and community advocates say poor conditions — including run-down infrastructure, dense populations, a lack of resources and social services and a prevalence of off-lease “ghost tenants” with criminal pasts — often fuel tensions that can exacerbate gun violence.

“It's the conditions in NYCHA that really break everybody down that lives there,” said Lew Zuchman, the executive director of SCAN-Harbor, an organization that works with at-risk youth in East Harlem. “Everyone focuses on the pathology of the young people rather than the pathology of the environment.”

Some residents, particularly teens and young adults, identify with their buildings and their surrounding territories and enter long-standing battles with crews from other complexes.

“One development will fight with another development simply because they live in opposing developments,” said NYPD Captain Rebecca Bukofzer-Tavarez of Police Service Area 5, which serves NYCHA developments in East Harlem.

Deynis DeLeon, 30, stood outside a bodega on Frederick Douglass Boulevard and West 129th Street and explained the patterns that create some of Harlem’s hot spots.

“These projects right here, all this, you know, there's a lot of gang activity,” he said, pointing to the St. Nicholas NYCHA complex across the street. “Of course you're going to have your one or two blocks right in between [where it’s] going to be fine, it's going to be safe.”

He added: “They kind of just shove [people] into these project buildings … And, you know, when they see each other, it's like war.”

In a statement, NYPD officials said the department focuses “relentlessly” on areas where the highest concentrations of crime exist, including gun violence.

Hot spot residents who spoke to Gothamist overwhelmingly said they were often relieved to see police officers on their block.

“That's literally the only thing we got protecting us,” said Joseph Rivera, 29, who lives near a hot spot on Webster Avenue and East 169th Street in the Bronx.

Ida Singleton, 65, agreed. She feels that police officers effectively deter violence in front of her building near the hot spot on Livonia and Rockaway avenues in Brownsville.

“They see them around, of course they're going to think twice to do something,” Singleton said.

Rhetoric versus reality

Public perception and political rhetoric often suggest that crime and gun violence are rampant across New York City but the data belies those narratives.

Gun violence continues to decline overall after a pandemic-era spike, and the rate of violence is far below 1990s levels.

“A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, you know, things are just as bad as they were in the ‘90s.’ And that's just simply not the case,” said John Jay’s Chris Herrmann, who specializes in tracking crime across the city.

“There's simply more reporting and better reporting of crime and I think that kind of fuels people's fear,” he said.

In 1991, about 2,200 homicides were reported citywide. The NYPD data doesn’t clarify how many of those were fatal shootings. In 2023, by contrast, there were 386 homicides and 222 of them were fatal shootings, according to Gothamist’s analysis.

“In the 1970s, about one out of three blocks in New York City experienced a violent criminal event in a year. One out of three,” Umbach said. “That's very different than the crime today that's much more concentrated. The risk of being involved in a gun incident, for most New Yorkers, approaches zero.”

But residents of the gun violence hot spots find it difficult to square those facts with their daily realities.

Gail Howard still has trouble visiting Sterling Place, where she remembers running outside to find her son on the ground, and how he told her he had a “hole” in his back. By the time she went upstairs to get her ID to take him to the hospital, he’d been whisked away in an ambulance.

On July 12 of this year, the only person of interest in Tyquan Howard’s case was fatally shot outside the Albany Houses, according to NYPD officials. Dyseem Jackson, 21, died four blocks away from where Howard was killed. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office said there wasn’t enough evidence to have charged Jackson with a crime.

“I'm going to try to get to the cemetery… I know he can't hear me, but he could feel my presence to let him know,” said Howard, who hopes that sharing the news at her son’s grave might help her feel some measure of closure.

“I just want to have at least one dream where he comes to me and he'd be like, ‘Mom, don't worry, live your life,’” she said tearfully. “I thought he was gonna make it … but they say God don't make no mistakes. So I guess [God] didn't want him to live out what's going on now.”

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky contributed reporting.