Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Firearms violence represents one of the most important social and public health issues in the U.S. Between 2015 and 2017, the number of homicides committed with a firearm in the U.S. increased by 15% to 15,666 per year. Firearm violence is not uniformly distributed throughout the environmental landscape. In 2015, half of U.S. firearm homicides were concentrated in 127 cities, and even within these cities, fatal shootings tended to be heavily clustered in specific neighborhood areas. While policing strategies that aim to identify these high-risk areas (or “hotspots”) have rapidly expanded over the past decades, much of this work is limited in scope. Our research leverage geospatial analysis to examine the extent to which the locations of built environment features such as libraries, schools, and restaurants influence the spatial distribution of firearms violence. We detect statistically significant relationships between the locations of built environment and firearms violence through the Cross-K Function for Stochastic Spatial Events. This method compares observed data with the outputs from a Monte Carlo Simulation. We examine results from four diverse metropolitan areas to unearth built environment features that consistently “attract” or “repel” firearms violence. Attractive or repellant Influence is further quantified through piecewise linear regression on the density firearms violence within increasing distances of a feature. Results of this work have implications for urban law enforcement and city planners in order to support safer community development.