# Philadelphia Gun Violence Dashboard

> An independent public-data reference and explorer for Philadelphia shooting-victim records.

## Scope

The primary dataset contains victim-level records published by the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD). One row represents one shooting victim; one incident can include more than one victim. The processed dataset retains only rows marked `N` in the source's officer-involved field.

PPD homicide totals are a separate citywide measure. They include homicides not caused by gunfire and should not be added to fatal shooting-victim records.

## Canonical pages

- [Explorer](https://www.nickhand.dev/philly-gun-violence-map): Interactive map, filters, charts, and filtered downloads.
- [Current and annual statistics](https://www.nickhand.dev/philly-gun-violence-map/stats): Citywide shooting-victim and homicide counts with source-specific data-through dates.
- [Data access, fields, sources, and terms](https://www.nickhand.dev/philly-gun-violence-map/data): Public downloads, field definitions, source dates, citation guidance, and licensing notes.
- [Scope, transformations, checks, and limitations](https://www.nickhand.dev/philly-gun-violence-map/methodology): Inclusion rules, processing steps, quality checks, court-search semantics, and limitations.
- [Project ownership and corrections](https://www.nickhand.dev/philly-gun-violence-map/about): Independent stewardship, project history, appropriate use, and corrections.

## Primary sources

- [PPD shooting-victim records](https://opendataphilly.org/datasets/shooting-victims/): Victim-level source records published through OpenDataPhilly.
- [PPD homicide statistics](https://www.phillypolice.com/crime-data/crime-statistics/): Separate official citywide homicide totals.
- [Pennsylvania public court search](https://ujsportal.pacourts.us/CaseSearch): Portal queried by incident number for the dashboard's three-value court-search field.

## Using and citing the information

- Use the Statistics page for current and annual counts. It gives each measure's source and data-through date.
- Use the Explorer's Download Data control for filtered records, all records in a selected year, or all available years.
- Use the Data page for field definitions and source links, and the Methodology page for inclusion rules, transformations, checks, and limitations.
- The Data page links the current GeoJSON boundary and street-block files and identifies the field used to join each file to the shooting-victim download.

When citing a figure, identify the measure, period or year, original publisher, and source-specific data-through date.

## Interpretation

- Records are preliminary and may be revised by their publishers.
- A missing source time may be stored as midnight and should not always be read as an exact incident time.
- Records without usable coordinates remain in totals and downloads but do not appear as point locations.
- A court-search flag has three states: true means an automated incident-number search returned a result; false means a completed search returned an explicit no-results response; unknown means the incident has not yet been checked or the search was unavailable, incomplete, or inconclusive. New incidents remain unknown until a later completed court search. None establishes a charge, disposition, case outcome, or verified relationship to a victim.
- Coordinates, boundaries, and demographic fields describe published records; they do not establish causes or an individual's circumstances.

## Stewardship and licensing

The dashboard began as a project at the Philadelphia City Controller's Office and is now maintained independently by Nick Hand. It is not an official City of Philadelphia website.

Project code is available under the MIT License. City and court records remain subject to their publishers' terms; the code license does not relicense those records.