Projects
Just Outside the School Gate, America’s Gun Violence Epidemic Surrounds Its Students
Every day, an average of 57 shootings occur near a school in the United States. To find this number, I created a database of the geolocations of tens of thousands of past and present k-12 schools and drew a 500-yard perimeter around each one. Then I used the sf package in R to spatially join each school to a database of more than 500,000 shootings and find how many shootings occurred nearby. I also built an interactive that lets you search for any k-12 school in America to see the shootings near it on a map. This story was co-published with Chalkbeat and appeared in a segment on the PBS NewsHour.
You’re More Likely to Be Shot in Selma Than in Chicago
I analyzed more than 522,000 shootings occurring over a decade to assess where the problem of gun violence has gotten worse. Turns out it's everywhere.
Youth Gun Suicide Is Rising, Particularly Among Children of Color
At The Trace, we were among the first to flag the troubling trend of massive increases in the rate of gun suicide among black and brown youths. After we shared our findings with the Centers for Disease Control, they issued a bulletin drawing attention to the issue. Tragically, our forecast proved accurate: last year for the first time the gun suicide rate for non-white young people surpassed that of their white counterparts.
Some of the Best Evidence for Gun Violence Prevention Almost Never Happened
If gun violence is a defining public health crisis of our time, why don't we know more about how to stop it? With interviews and analysis I uncover the reasons it's difficult to measure the effects of community gun violence prevention programs.
Surgeon Scorecard
An analysis of more than 2 million health claims found that a small percentage of surgeons are responsible for the lion's share of surgical complications. For the first time, consumers could look up the Medicare death and readmission rates of 17,000 surgeons.
Democrats and California's Redistricting Commission
In 2011, for the first time California's electoral maps were drawn by an independent commission. But commissioners were intentionally blinded to the political ramifications of their lines. To get the districts they wanted, Democrats organized groups that said they represented communities, but really represented incumbents.
