Gun Violence in Brooklyn: Looking at a Map

People moving to Brooklyn often want advice on safety: which neighborhoods, or parts of neighborhoods, are safer()?

The answer: it's tricky, because gun violence, for example, is more prevalent late at night, and among people--notably gang members or wannabes--who know each other. And it's also somewhat more prevalent near public housing complexes, though most residents try to live decent lives on limited incomes and 42% of households work.
 
That said, a May 2024 New York Times interactive feature on gun violence shows some sharply divergent results for Brooklyn, including clusters of violence and areas with few shootings.

Those clusters include, on my annotated map below, public housing complexes in Fort Greene/Downtown Brooklyn (pink--purple arrow) and in Red Hook (light blue arrow), in the western part of the borough.

Turning toward Central Brooklyn, the south central part of Bedford-Stuyvesant (dark blue arrow) and the western part of Crown Heights (dark purple arrow), also have a somewhat elevated record of shootings, even as those neighborhood gentrify steadily.

Finally, the darker-red highlights on the map indicate neighborhoods with concentrations of poverty and violence, notably southeast Crown Heights and Brownsville. There's a deeper story here about the lingering effects of inequitable development in Brooklyn, told notably in Craig Steven Wilder's A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn.​