Epidemiology of fatal and nonfatal community firearm violence in New York City, 2019-2023.

Background: Endemic levels of community firearm violence in United States cities disproportionately burden certain sociodemographic groups. Nonfatal injuries are an understudied aspect of firearm violence. Police data in a large and heterogenous place like New York City (NYC) provide the unique opportunity to use a single data source to measure fatal and nonfatal community firearm violence.

Methods: The study analyzed epidemiologic trends in fatal and nonfatal community firearm violence using the publicly available New York Police Department (NYPD) Shooting Incident Dataset from 2019 to 2023. The analyses tabulated shooting victims by sociodemographic variables (age group, race and ethnicity, and sex) and case fatality rates, mapped shootings by census tract, and described social determinants of health (SDOH)-poverty, educational attainment, unemployment-in the census tracts where shootings occurred.

Results: From 2019 to 2023, the annual average number of shooting victims in NYC was 1,578. Shootings doubled from 2019 to 2020 though trended downward from 2021 to 2022 to 2023. Four out of five shootings were nonfatal. Males, people ages 18-24, and non-Hispanic Black people in NYC experienced the greatest proportion of shootings. Shootings coincided with census tracts also experiencing above median percentages of adverse SDOH (i.e., highest levels of unemployment, poverty, and low educational attainment).

Discussion: Nonfatal injuries are an important component of community firearm violence to monitor. The findings identify inequities in community firearm violence by sex, age group, and race and ethnicity in NYC. One contributor to racial inequities in violence is the impact of place-based SDOH in certain NYC neighborhoods.

Conclusions: This study leverages NYPD data to estimate the full magnitude of violence by tracking nonfatal in addition to fatal injuries. The study emphasizes the need for researchers to go beyond individual demography and better understand the place-based social determinants of firearm violence.