Why a School Shooting Database Exists: "Clear school safety data is nowhere to be found"
The Gothamist summed up the problem in one sentence: "For parents curious about safety at their kids' schools, there is no comprehensive, comprehensible or regularly updated database on the issue."
Every now and then I read a story that makes me stop and say “Wow, this is exactly why I do what I do”. A headline this morning from The Gothamist did that: Clear data on New York City school safety is nowhere to be found.
I started the K-12 School Shooting Database after the Parkland shooting in 2018 because there was no answer to this simple question: “How many school shootings have there been?”. There also weren’t answers for how many shootings occurred at schools in 2017 or just schools in Florida.
Without knowing the number of shootings, or more importantly, why these attacks happened, policymakers and school officials were guessing about the policies and practices that might solve this problem.
Imagine not having any data about highway fatalities and assembling a group of local officials to figure out how to make a highway safer. They might agree to add street lights (a cheap, visible, and simple solution) when the problem is actually that the speed limit is too high (lowering it would be unpopular) or the road is banked in the wrong direction (very expensive to regrade the road). In other words, when there isn’t data, public officials are left to guess about easily implementable and popular investments that might not address the real problem.
Imagine being a parent and hearing from your child that a rumor was going around the school about a gun being confiscated or a bullet hitting the school building during classes. You would want a transparent source of information to be able to find out what happened. Even as the number of shootings on campus rises each year, this school-level and community-level information is not readily available to parents.
Back to The Gothamist report today by Jessica Gould.
Jessica’s reporting makes four very important points:
Government crime data lacks timeliness, quality control, and standardization. New York’s state data lags by two years, as does the FBI’s national crime data. Even worse, state data conflicts with data collected by New York City.
The state education department maintains a “School Safety and Educational Climate” database documenting the number of homicides, sexual offenses, assaults and weapons possession cases at city schools. The data hasn’t been updated since the 2021-22 school year – and is jarringly different from NYPD data about weapons recovered at schools.
The state database lists only felony-level weapons possession incidents. During the 2021-22 school year, there were 197 weapons possession charges at 1,853 schools, including charter schools, according to the database.
But internal NYPD data tracking weapons recovered by school safety officers tells a strikingly different story. According to the records from the School Safety Division obtained by Gothamist, cops recovered 970 weapons that school year at just 10 schools.
To find discrepancies in government data, you need time and the knowledge about specific datapoints to compare. This is not easy for a parent worried about their child’s safety or a school official trying to make a policy decision. If the state of New York sees data showing only one incident, state officials might not allocate additional funding to address weapons in schools. Meanwhile, when city officials know there were 113 weapons, they might be under pressure to make investments without the extra funding to do so. The result might be cutting extra curricular activities to pay for metal detectors with scarce city education dollars.
The NYPD recorded 113 weapons found at Benjamin Cardozo High School in Bayside, Queens, during the 2021-22 school year – the third-most of any school. Meanwhile, state education department data notes only one weapon possession case at the school.
Government data is generally insufficient and sometimes unusable because agencies use different definitions. For example, for school shootings the Department of Justice, FBI, Secret Service, and Department of Education all have different numbers because they use different criteria. These problems are compounded because it’s often unclear who is responsible for reporting. Moreover, if the data isn’t a priority, you can image an overworked person with other primary responsibilities being assigned to submit the reports. Once local workers individually submit their data, manually consolidating all of this information at the state or federal level takes years to complete.
The state education department referred questions about the discrepancy to the city Department of Education, adding that individual schools are responsible for submitting data for the state database. The education department referred questions to the NYPD, which runs the city’s school safety division. The NYPD then pointed to a separate public database filled with police jargon. The NYPD and state use different definitions of “weapons.”
Public government data is not user friendly or transparent. For comparison, the K-12 School Shooting Database has sources listed for every incident, a published methodology, and plain language descriptions of every variable.
The public NYPD site with school safety data doesn’t offer much clarity. The site doesn’t have a tally of weapons recovered by police. The database uses so much police jargon – like “PINS Warrant,” “mitigated” and “restraints” – that it requires a key to decipher. Even if one uses the key, there’s no way to divine the nature of the incident that took place.
This all adds up to a HUGE problem. How can New York State and New York City identify trends, evaluate the effectiveness of policies/programs/investments, and allocate funding if they don’t have accurate and consistent data on the problems they are trying to solve?
Path Forward
Question: Why does the K-12 School Shooting Database exist?
Answer: Because governments fail to accurately and transparently track this information. The lack of reliable data – or any data – leaves policy makers guessing and parents without critical information to hold school leaders to account for their child’s safety.
Vision: Real-time tracking of shootings, stabbings, threats, swatting, and weapons seized at schools across the country.
To reduce violence in schools by implementing meaningful public policy and investments, we need to recognize and address the root causes of these problems using open-source public data. Governments continue to fail to do this, so please support my work to compile this critically important information.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.