Children murdered in Chicago in the first half of 2010

Over the past few weeks I have been working to collate and visualize the alarming data above and in the next few posts.

Chicago is a violent city. In the first half of 2010, through July 31st, 42 children have been murdered within the city limits. Included are all under the age of 18, from a girl named Molina who died as a newborn from abuse in Edgewater on February 22nd to Eric Stevens who died in Gresham at the age of 18 from a gunshot wound. Another boy, who is 16, was also shot in that attack but will survive. This also occurred during the month of February. All locators have the name of the victim, their age and race, as well as how they died and where. Most also include links to the news stories about their deaths.

I will also be posting interactive maps for the underaged fatalities that occured in 2008 and 2009.

Here is the infomration that I posted with those other two maps as to why I have compled the above:

I started putting these databases together out a sense of frustration and helplessness over what is happening to youth in Chicago over the past few years.

While I work in education and have also done some work in regards to educational reform and protest, I still felt relatively stifled in my role and what I felt were my responsibilities. Each one of these charts is an attempt to address the frustration I felt in a language I felt I could express myself in.

When I started to get my Masters in Library Science last year I had a very limited idea of the role of a librarian that was based on old stereotypes of a type of professional that probably never existed outside of pop culture. It is in my role as a budding "informational professional" ( a somewhat funny sounding term to me to be honest). The work done in compiling these maps and graphs is fully within how I now see the role of a "librarian": Someone who checks out books to be sure but is also involved in the archiving of the community that they live in. In this case that being Chicago.

At the end of this past school year in June I wanted to find the numbers for how many children had been killed over the course of the school year that passed. I found myself surprised that this information was not particularly easy to come by.

After looking through various resources and finally finding the "Data" section of the Chicago Tribune's Redeye site I was able to uild these maps off of the data provided by their fine site. Tracy Swartz and Drew Sottardi do an excellent job on that site compiling and presenting a host of information that more Chicagoans should know about.

I also suggest looking at the excellent Crime Lab site of the University of Chicago for another source of data driven reports and possible solutions to the 3rd world level of violence that is currently afflicting Chicago's streets.

The title is linked to the raw data that I have compiled in spreadsheet form. If anyone wishes to use this raw data please feel free to. I have created it to be shared, amended, corrected, and built on.