The U.S. Gun Sellers Map

These days it seems that the only interactive maps coming out of the USA are related to mass-shootings, gun homicides and other gun related maps. Here's another one.

The Oregonian's Gun Sellers in the United States map shows the number of licensed gun sellers per 100,000 people at county level. If you mouse-over a county on the map you can view the number of gun sellers in the county and the total population.

One of the big questions here must be whether the number of licensed importers, pawnshops and sellers of firearms in a county actually has any effect on the number of gun crimes in the area. The Oregonian's own US Gun Deaths Map 2004-2010 provides a neat comparison. This map shows the average number of gun deaths per 100,000 county residents. The map therefore does provide a good overview of where the most gun deaths are occurring, in proportion to the population.

If you compare the two maps it seems that there may be some correlation between the number of gun sellers in some counties and the number of gun deaths - but not in many other areas. For example, in some of the north-western states there are a high number of gun sellers and a high proportion of gun deaths. However, if you look at the gun homicides map on the Oregonian you will see that those north-western states actually have a lower than average number of gun homicides. The majority of those gun deaths in the north-west come from people killing themselves with guns.

The southern states tend to have the highest gun homicides per population. If you look at the choropleth map of gun sellers you can see that the south in general actually has a lower than average number of gun sellers per population. So the link between the number of licensed gun sellers and the number of gun homicides in a county appears to be pretty weak.

Every Shooting Mapped

Since the tragic attack on the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino last week there have been a lot of maps doing the rounds of mass shootings in the United States. Slate however have created a different map.

Less than 2 percent of gun deaths in the U.S. are due to mass shootings. Also not every single person shot dies. Slate's Map of Shootings in America shows the location of every shooting in the United States in 2015. This includes shootings that resulted in a fatality or injury.

The map is of course very frightening. Zoom in on many neighborhoods in the United States and it isn't easy to find a road or street that hasn't witnessed at least one shooting this year. According to Slate some experts have forecast that more people will die from gunshots this year than from car accidents. Looking at this map that prediction isn't hard to believe.

Death Map New York

Death Map NYC is a a map of homicides and motor vehicle related deaths in New York over the last two years. Homicides on the map are indicated by the skull markers with the glock pistols, other deaths are represented by a skull icon on its own.

The map uses a nice polygon masking effect to show only New York on the map. However, as the map's creator acknowledges, the map does have a problem in displaying the large number of markers. Marker clustering could have been used to handle the large number of markers more efficiently.

The map could also benefit from an option to filter the data on the map. It would be nice to be able to just view the homicides on the map or view only the motor vehicle related deaths. It would also be useful to be able to filter the results shown by month.

Chicago's Homan Square Detainees

For a while The Guardian has been investigating the use by the Chicago Police Department of Homan Square. The Guardian describes the facility as "an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site."

In a new interactive presentation, Homan Square - A portrait of Chicago’s detainees, the paper has created an impressive visualization breaking down the data behind the 7,185 arrests of people taken to Homan Square between 5 August 2004 and 30 June 2015. Throughout The Guardian's presentation the 7,185 arrests are represented as small portraits. As you progress through the interactive the portraits are rearranged to show the demographics of those arrested, the type of crimes people were arrested for and the dates of the arrests.

The data portraits are also rearranged to create a map showing where these arrests were made in Chicago. It is very impressive how The Guardian seamlessly rearranges the dots from a chart view into an oblique map view and then into a map plan view. All made possible by the use of Scalable Vector Graphics.

The Puppycide Map

1 Point 21 Interactive claim that one dog is shot by law enforcement officers every 98 minutes. To help record and commemorate the dogs killed at the hands of the police they have created the Puppycide Map.

The map allows anyone to enter the details of a dog which has been the victim of law enforcement action. Dog owners can enter their stories and photos of their dogs at the location where their pets were killed.

Each paw print on the map represents a dog shot by police officers. You can click on the individual markers to view the details of the incident and any photos and videos uploaded by the dog's owners.

Jack the Ripper Map

In the Footsteps of Jack the Ripper maps the series of Nineteenth Century murders of women in London's East End attributed to the unidentified serial killer, dubbed Jack the Ripper.

The crime scenes of each murder are marked on top of a Nineteenth Century map of London. If you click on a victim's marker you can actually see how the location looks today using Google Maps Street View.

The map uses the Odyssey library, which is a story map template created by CartoDB. This means that you can use the forward and back arrows to progress through the portraits of each of the victims. The map sidebar provides information about each of the murders (in Spanish), including the date of the murder.

The map was created by Angel de Marcos López, a Spanish graphic designer who specializes in map design.

Mapping the Watts Riots

Fifty years ago yesterday a a black motorist was arrested for drunk-driving in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. An argument ensued which quickly escalated from a minor disturbance into a riot, followed by six days of looting and arson.

In December 1965 the McCone Commission report was published. The report documented the results of the McCone Commission inquiry into the riot and its causes. It also contained recommendations as to how the Watts area could be improved in order to ensure that this scale of social unrest never occurred again.

The report included a map of the Watts curfew area imposed by California Lt. Gov. Glenn Anderson. This map also contained data, compiled by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Sheriff's Office, on the destruction caused in Watts over the six days of rioting.

The Los Angeles Times has created an interactive version of the map using the Leaflet mapping library. You can use the Inside the Curfew Zone map to see the extent of the curfew zone and the data compiled by the Los Angeles police.

The LA Times has also added a number of markers linking to original photographs taken during the riots. If you select one of the camera icons on the map the web page scrolls down to show the photo and a description of what is depicted in the photograph.

Shootings in New York

Shootings in New York: 2010-2013 is a map of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation Center's Shooting Index for New York census tracts.

The Center's Shooting Index represents the per capita number of shootings within a tract in which a civilian was injured from 2010-2013. That is clear enough. However the index is 'calculated to weigh recent shootings more heavily than shootings for earlier years'. Which without any information on the weighting applied by the Center is a lot less clear.

The map includes the option to click on the census tracts to discover information about the racial make-up of the population, the percentage of people in employment and the percentage living in poverty. It is a shame that this data doesn't also include the total number of shootings which would help to overcome the opaqueness of the Center's own Index values.

Timelapse of New York City Crime

Timelapse of Crime in NY is an animated choropleth map of 15 years of crime in each of New York City's precincts. Press the play button and the map updates to show the number of reported crimes in each precinct for each year since 2000.

The use of an animated timeline choropleth map is pretty effective in visualizing the overall drop of reported crime throughout the city in the last 15 years. I also like the transition fading between the two separate colors when a precinct polygon updates.

If you select a precinct on the map you can view a bar chart of reported crime in the precinct for the last 15 years.

Chicago's Rising Costs of Incarceration

This year Illinois will spend 1.4 billion dollars on the Department of Corrections. A large proportion of that money will be spent on locking up Chicagoans from the low-income neighborhoods on the west and south sides of the city.

Chicago's Million Dollar Blocks maps how much money is being spent on incarcerating individuals from each Chicago block. A large number of these blocks in the west and south sides of the city are costing the city over a million dollars. The data is based on sentence lengths and on an estimation that the Department of Corrections spends approximately $22,000 per year for each inmate.

The map includes two main layers: All Offences & Drug-Related. If you mouse-over a block on the map you can view the cost to the state of both drug-related incarcerations and for all offences. If you zoom out on the map you can also view a choropleth layer showing the cost of incarceration at the neighborhood level.

Mapping Hate Crimes in Moscow

The Civic Assistance Committee and the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis have released an interactive map to record instances of hate crime in Moscow. The map shows the locations of attacks against ethnic, religious, or other vulnerable groups in the city.

The red markers on the Hate Crimes map indicate hate crimes which resulted in the death of the victim and the green markers indicate crimes which resulted in non-fatal injuries. The map includes the option to filter the results shown on the map by time and by the age & gender of the victim.

If you select a hate crime victim's marker on the map you can read more details about the nature of the attack, the victim and the result (or, more commonly, the lack of a result) in any resulting criminal case.

Via: Meduza

Mapping Police Killings

So far this year 463 people have been shot dead by the police in the United States. The Washington Post has compiled (and will continue to update) a database of the victims of these police shootings.

The Post's Police Shootings interactive allows you to explore the data in a number of formats, including a timeline, cartogram and interactive map. The map view shows the locations of 413 of the shootings (50 shootings with unverified locations are not shown on the map). The map includes a number of options which allow you to filter the result by the sex, race and age of the victims.

The cartogram view shows the number of shootings (per million people) by state. Normalizing the data by population means that you can make a reasonable comparison between each state. The cartogram reveals that Oklahoma has the worst record of police shootings and that the highest state rates fall in the south and west.

Police Killings Mapped

A number of high profile cases of people being killed at the hands of the police over the last few years has led to the growth in maps visualizing these deaths in the United States.

The Counted is a Guardian interactive which maps and analyses the number of people killed by the police so far in 2015. The map shows the location of each police killing recorded so far this year.

If you select a marker on the map you can read a description of the person killed and an account of the circumstances surrounding the death. The description includes links to local press reports of the incident.

There were a number of well reported instances of black American citizens being killed by the police in 2014. Not all of them were as well reported as the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. According to Mapping Police Violence there were at least 1175 people killed by the police last year. 302 (25%) of them were black.

The National Police Violence Map is a mapped timeline of the 302 black men and women killed by the police in 2014. The map uses CartoDB's Torque library to animate through the year. You can click on any of the map markers to learn more about the individual killed and a brief description of the circumstances surrounding the death.


Home.Land.Security say that there are many websites dedicated to mapping crime but not many that are mapping where people feel vulnerable because of the police themselves.

Home.Land.Security claim that many individuals  "including people of color, queer folks, and undocumented immigrants" see a police presence as itself a threat. They have therefore determined to map police shootings and targeted arrests for what they call "quality of life" crimes in San Francisco. 

The Home.Land.Security map allows users to view the locations of 'Officer Involved Shootings' and reported  "Quality of Life Crimes". It is also possible to load demographic data onto the map and to view San Francisco neighborhood boundaries.

The Contours of Crime

The R Tutorial for Spatial Statistics blog has a series of interesting maps visualizing London crime data. The blog post is a great tutorial on mapping data using R.

The maps include a choropleth map showing the number of crimes in each London borough, a heat map of crime in London and a contour map of crime in London. It is fascinating how these different map visualization techniques reveal different aspects about the nature of crime in the UK capital.

The heat map seems to suggest that crime is closely related to residential population. The areas with the lowest levels of crime are the financial districts of the City of London and Canary Wharf. The other areas of low crime in London seem to be other pockets of low residential density, such as the big London parks.


The contour map of crime appears to identify distinct problem areas of crime centered around Shoreditch High Street, Camden Town and the area of the West End around Leicester Square. It may not be a coincidence that these three areas are popular centers of night-life entertainment. It just might be that a large number of intoxicated young people leads to higher levels of crime.

Via: Visualoop


Mapbox recently used animated contour lines to visualize crime in Chicago from 2001-2015. The Mapbox map is a neat demonstration of the capabilities of Turf.js.

Chicago Crime Data with Turf provides a moving timeline of crime in Chicago over more than a decade. The graph beneath the map shows how Chicago crime during this period has declined. One neat feature of the map is that you can select a date-range on the timeline to loop through the selected time period in the map animation.

Mapping Child Gun Deaths

This is the most depressing map of the week. The #NotAnAccident Index map plots the locations of child related gun accidents and deaths in the USA so far in 2015.

So far there has been at least 80 child shootings in 2015, where a person aged 17 or under has unintentionally killed or injured someone with a gun. If you select a marker on the map you can read details about the incident in the map side-panel, including the type of weapon involved and the location where the incident took place.

The data is also available beneath the map in the form of a table.

A Street View Virtual Prison Tour

Google Maps has lots of indoor Street View tours of businesses, churches and other buildings around the world. However I don't think they've done a virtual prison tour yet. The Correctional Service of Canada has.

CSC’s Virtual Tour of a Canadian Penitentiary allows you to tour a Canadian federal prison using 360 degree panoramic images. The tour allows you to see inside cells for minimum, medium and maximum security prisoners. You can also view inside the chapel, workshop and other prison facilities.

You can navigate around the prison by following the arrows on the panoramic images or you can use a map to navigate by clicking on the map button in the map side-panel.

The Changing Contours of Chicago Crime

The Mapbox Blog has published another neat map demonstrating the capabilities of Turf.js. Chicago Crime Data with Turf is an animated heat-map of Chicago crime data since 2001.

The map provides a moving timeline of crime in Chicago over more than a decade. The graph beneath the map shows how Chicago crime during this period has declined. One neat feature of the map is that you can select a date-range on the timeline to loop through the selected time period in the map animation.

Mapping Police Violence and Killings

There were a number of well reported instances of black American citizens being killed by the police in 2014. Not all of them were as well reported as the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. According to Mapping Police Violence there were at least 1175 people killed by the police in 2014. 302 (25%) of them were black.

The National Police Violence Map is a mapped timeline of the 302 black men and women killed by the police in 2014. The map uses CartoDB's Torque library to animate through the year. You can click on any of the map markers to learn more about the individual killed and a brief description of the circumstances surrounding the death.


Home.Land.Security say that there are many websites dedicated to mapping crime but not many that are mapping where people feel vulnerable because of the police themselves.

Home.Land.Security claim that many individuals  "including people of color, queer folks, and undocumented immigrants" see a police presence as itself a threat. They have therefore determined to map police shootings and targeted arrests for what they call "quality of life" crimes in San Francisco. 

The Home.Land.Security map allows users to view the locations of 'Officer Involved Shootings' and reported  "Quality of Life Crimes". It is also possible to load demographic data onto the map and to view San Francisco neighborhood boundaries.


After the shooting of the unarmed 18-year-old Mike Brown in Ferguson by a police officer a number of Ferguson citizens came together to form Hands Up United.

Hands Up United's goal in the short-term is to get justice for the shooting of Mike Brown and, in the long-term, to help prevent future incidents of police brutality. To help achieve this goal Hand Up United has released an interactive map which anyone can use to post reports of police brutality or police misuse of power.


This Google Map from the Cato Institute shows the location of botched SWAT and paramilitary police raids in the United States.

The Cato Institute argue that "the Drug War (has) given rise to a dramatic increase in the number of 'no-knock' or 'quick-knock' raids on suspected drug offenders. Because these raids are often conducted based on tips from notoriously unreliable confidential informants, police sometimes conduct SWAT-style raids on the wrong home, or on the homes of nonviolent, misdemeanor drug users."

The Botched Paramilitary Police Raids map uses colored map markers to show raids that led to the death of innocent people, the death of a non-violent offender, the death or injury of a police officer etc. It is possible to refine the data on the map by state, year and by outcome. 

The Militarization of the Police

Mapping the Militarization of Law Enforcement in the United States is a map showing how much police forces have spent on 1033 Program military equipment. Police forces throughout the United States have used the program to purchase items such as cold weather clothing, sand bags, medical supplies, sleeping bags and flashlights.

The program has also been used by some police forces to equip themselves with grenade launchers, aircraft, watercraft and armored vehicles. This map allows you to view at county level how much money police forces have spent on the 1033 Program, the cost of this to tax payers (per household) and to view exactly what equipment has been purchased by local police forces.


Using the Pentagon's Excess Property Program (1033) police forces across the United States are equipping themselves with military grade guns, grenade launchers, vehicles, night vision and body armor.  The New York Times created this interactive map to reveal what surplus military equipment county police forces have obtained through the program.

Mapping the Spread of the Military's Surplus Gear uses data from the Pentagon to show where police forces have obtained surplus military gear. You can select a county on the map to view what equipment a local police force has obtained under the Excess Property Program and in what quantity. You can also select a category of military equipment to see which counties across the United States have been in receipt of that type of surplus military gear.

The map itself was created with D3.js. If you are interested in creating a similar map then Suffen.us has an easy to follow tutorial, Making a Simple Interactive Map Prototype with D3…For Total Beginners Who are Totally Impatient, explaining how to create a US counties map with D3.js, using a common separated values file to load the data.

Witness Killings Mapped

The Washington Post has mapped the murders of 37 people in D.C. and Maryland who were killed because they were cooperating with law enforcement or because their killers thought that they might cooperate.

Witness Killing Since 2004 uses Mapbox to plot the murder locations of the 37 victims. As you scroll down the page the map sidebar scrolls through the details on each of the 37 victims and highlights their location on the map. You can filter the results by those victims who were offered witness protection, those who weren't and those who refused protection.

A timeline above the map indicates how long after the crimes they witnessed the victims were killed.