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Density of American Homicide

This is a map of 28 cities within the United States. (28 is an arbitrary number.)



It plots homicide per capita per square mile. These cities have the most homicide per person per square mile.

What does that even mean?

I'm not sure - and if anyone knows of a proper name for this metric, please let me know.

FWIW I consider it the "density" of homicide - where density is both social density (ie "per capita") and geographic density (ie "per square mile").

I think those attributes of homicide express important social attributes of violence, like proximity and intensity. In these 28 cases, where the social fabric in real physical space is most "war-torn". Where killing hits "closest to home". Where there are witnesses and bystanders to murder.

Clicking on the city will show the underlying calculations and the rank of the city. I will try to clean those up - this is a work in progress. Feedback and questions are welcome.

For future work: I am most interested in how illicit trade between clusters/close proximity pairs represent a kind of "bazaar of violence" - a characterization justified by DEA's map of TCO's.

Example corridor: Newark to Richmond. In between, connected via the I-95, homicide is most dense in Trenton (1), Newark (2), Philadelphia (23), Baltimore (7), DC (14), Richmond (11). In 2014, these six cities connected via I-95 summed 730 homicides.






The criminal I-95 economy connecting these cities January 15, 1989:
Police between Washington and New York call the highway ''Cocaine Alley.'' In Georgia and the Carolinas, it's ''Cocaine Lane.''
Stretching 1,866 miles from Miami to Houlton, Maine - from tropical metropolis to potato town - I-95 has earned the dubious distinction of being the nation's busiest drug-smuggling corridor.
As described by the I-95 connected town paper, the Orlando Sentinel.

Source Data for "density" of homicide interactive map:
FBI 2014
accessed a few days ago







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