Violence is the use of physical, verbal and/or emotional force to injure, harm, abuse, damage or destroy. While violence can be self-inflicted, community violence occurs outside the home between people who or may not know each other.

Violence is frequently described through homicide statistics. While homicide is a leading cause of death, especially among 15–34-year-olds, and captures the most severe form of violence, non-fatal violence-related injuries are much more common and help paint the larger picture on the burden of violence and its impact on the health and future of individuals, families, and communities.

Violence disproportionately affects groups oppressed because of their socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, geographic location, or some combination of these factors. Its persistent and inequitable contributions to morbidity and premature mortality in NYC make it a public health priority, and firearms as a source of interpersonal violence have a direct impact on premature death. The implications of community violence on impacted communities include long-term psychological trauma, reduced economic opportunities, deteriorated social cohesion, and increased healthcare costs.

To understand what drives violence, it is important to look at the context and systems within which it occurs and consider the negative impact that historic practices (e.g., redlining) and ongoing social structures (e.g., institutional racism) have on affected groups and communities. Social Determinants of health are conditions people may be born into or fall into over the course of their lives. SDH contribute to violence and convey messages about which groups and communities are deprived of resources and which are privileged by them. Some examples of SDH that contribute to violence include:

• Poverty and presence of employment opportunities
• Access to affordable housing
• Access to quality education, and educational attainment
• Quality of the built environment

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s has invested in the Violence Prevention Initiative (VPI) to address the challenges of community violence by seeking to strengthen neighborhoods disproportionally burdened by it. VPI is rooted in principles of health equity in which everyone should have the opportunity to realize their full health potential. VPI values a multi-strategy, community-centered, and trauma-informed approach to reduce risk factors that contribute to violence. VPI highlights the SDHs that contribute to the violence in disinvested communities, prioritizes solutions that help address behavioral and structural barriers, and works across systems and communities to reinvest in neighborhoods most affected by violence.

There are many schemes of neighborhood boundaries (or geographies) available for different datasets. These include:

• Citywide
• Borough
• United Hospital Fund 42 (UHF42) and United Hospital Fund 34 (UHF34) neighborhoods
• Community Districts (CD), and, related, Community District Tabulation Areas (CDTA)
• Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMA)
• Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTA)

We try to make data available at as fine a geographic resolution as we can. Read more about different geographies at this data story.

It would be convenient if each dataset could be made available at the same geography, but this is not always possible. The neighborhood boundaries available depend on the specifics of the underlying dataset.

When we have multiple years of data, we show the data as trend charts.

Trends for individual neighborhoods tend to be very unstable (or "bouncy"), due to small counts for outcomes in individual neighborhoods. To show clearer trends, we usually aggregate up and show trend data by Borough.

Options on some indicators let you compare this indicator to other similar indicators.

We try to make data available as soon as we can.

Many datasets take a long time to reach us — a "lag" of several years, during which data are gathered from different entities to try to create a complete dataset; data are processed (cleaned, deduplicated, etc), and analyzed. It can take several years to prepare a dataset — so a dataset that is several years old is sometimes the most up-to-date information available. Still, this data continues to show us valuable trends and insights.

We also try to display datasets that have been available for many years. Some datasets (like those that are asked on surveys) are not asked every year of the survey, which means that we cannot provide annual data.

For some datasets, we have to aggregate time periods in order to break down data by borough or neighborhood.

Measures are the numeric ways that a dataset (or indicator) are expressed. Examples of different measures might be: number, percent or rate.

A number tells us how much of an outcome is in a certain area. But a rate (usually expressed as, for example, 40 per 100,000) tells us how much of an outcome there is, relative to the population of the area in question. This lets us compare neighborhoods of different sizes.

On this site, we try to show how environmental factors might be connected to health outcomes. One way we do this is with Correlates. We choose potentially-related datasets and display them on a scatterplot so you can see how these two datasets are correlated.

The Disparities view displays neighborhoods by poverty category to show underlying disparities in the data.

Read more about correlation here.