The Steans Family Foundation (SFF) dedicates time, resources, and skills within the North Lawndale community, located on Chicago’s west side. SFF believes effective revitalization can occur within the existing social, educational, and economic networks that create and sustain communities. SFF believes that with investment, coupled with a strong policy ecosystem, communities can thrive.

4 minute read

Purpose
To analyze violence spikes and reductions in North Lawndale from 1990 – 2025 in order to identify periods of shooting declines and increases and compare them to documented Community Violence Intervention activity in the neighborhood. Furthermore, we hope this historical analysis of shooting victimizations, both Fatal & Non-Fatal can help us contextualize the most recent surge in North Lawndale shootings since 2020 to get a different perspective on the impact of the North Lawndale Collaborative’s CVI efforts.

Unit of Analysis: Fatal & Non-Fatal Shootings

Data on shootings in North Lawndale comes from the “Violence Reduction - Victims of Homicides and Non-Fatal Shootings” dataset on City of Chicago’s Open Data Portal. The records in this dataset cover the years 1991 through 2025; however, while data on “Fatal Shootings” is available from 1991-2025, data on “Non-Fatal Shootings” is only available from 2010 to the Present.

Periodization of Shooting Victimizations

To make the most of the longitudinal nature of this shooting data, we first looked at only “Fatal Shootings” from 1991 to 2024 (excluding 2025 because we are only two months into the year) in order to identify and chart different eras or periods of Shootings & Violence Intervention over the past 33 years. The following periods were identified and defined based on trends of historic decreases or surges in the absolute number of Fatal Shootings occurring in the North Lawndale Community Area.

  1. Decades of Decline (1991-2007)
  2. Stabilization (2007-2014)
  3. Surge (2014-2019)
  4. COVID-19 (2021-2024)

The Decades of Decline from 1991-2007 was a period of progressive decline from 36 annual fatal shootings in 1991 reaching its all-time low of 8 annual fatal shootings in 2007. The Stabilization period of 2007-2014 saw the number of fatal shootings trend slightly upward from 8 in 2007 to 22 in 2009 and 19 in 2012 with returns back down between these peaks of 15 in 2011 and 10 in 2014, close to the 2007 low. From 2014-2017, fatal shootings rose drastically to an all-time high of 40 per year in 2017, coming in just above the previous all-time high of 39 in 1996 twenty-one years earlier. Over the next two years, this peak was reduced by 41% to 23 fatal shootings in 2019. COVID-19, which was known to have a national level impact on increasing rates of violence, saw a 100% jump from 23 fatal shootings in 2019 to 46 in 2021 before dropping and hovering around 29 fatal shooting per year from 2022-2024.

While the ability to analyze longitudinal data over the last 30 years provides valuable insights, looking narrowly at “Fatal Shootings” only tells part of the story, that of the worst outcomes of gun violence. While “Non-Fatal” shooting data is not available until 2010, from that point onwards, we can see (in the figure below) that the Number of Non-Fatal Shootings dwarfs that of Fatal Shootings at a rate as high as 7.4 to 1 in 2016 or as low as 4 to 1 in 2015. Furthermore, Non-Fatal shootings could become Fatal shootings with just a small twist of fate or bad luck and provides a measure of the greater level of violence in the community that could become fatal.

From 2010 to 2024, North Lawndale saw an all-time low of 83 annual shootings in 2014 and an all-time high of 286 annual shootings two years later in 2016, a surge of nearly 300%. We saw a decline of 46% from 286 in 2016 to 154 in 2019. The onset of COVID-19 increased the annual number of shootings by 67.2% to an average of 257.5 annual shootings in 2020-2021 before trending back down by 39.2% to an average of 156.6 annual shootings from 2022-2024.

The below figure looks at how the rate of shootings per 10,000 residents has changed from 2010-2024, with the population of North Lawndale used to compute this rate being provided by ACS 5-year estimates for each year in the dataset, aside from 2024 which uses the 2023 population estimate. The City of Chicago’s Rate of Shooting is 12 shootings per 10,000 residents, whereas North Lawndale has seen that number as high as 85.3 in 2016 and as low as 24.8 shootings in 2014. The below graph shows, despite surges in 2015-16 and 2019-2021, that North Lawndale has been hovering around a shooting rate of roughly 50 shootings per 10,000 residents.

Beyond looking at the total trends of shooting violence in North Lawndale, a question that arises is how has the geography of shooting crimes changes over the past 30 years? Are we seeing the same areas have the same problem, or are we seeing an evolution in the distribution and locations of this violence? Below is a heatmap of all shootings Fatal & Non-Fatal between 1991-2024, with the caveat that for the years 1991-2009 only “Fatal Shooting” data was available.

The heatmap reveals a number of clustered shootings across North Lawndale on the north side at the W Roosevelt Rd & S Avers and W 13th St & S Lawndale intersections. These shooting clusters continue hugging down the west side of Douglass Park at the W Douglas Blvd & Homan St intersection down to a line of three clusters extending across W 16th from Ridegway to Spalding. Two other larger clusters can be detected nearby heading West down Ogden at the S Trumbull & W 21st St and W Cermak & S Kolin intersection.

Discussion
The Steans Family Foundation’s goal for the next ten years is to achieve parity with the City of Chicago and reduce North Lawndale’s shooting rate to 12 shootings per 10k residents, or down to the equivalent of 40 total shootings annually. To do so requires that we understand what was happening between 2014-2016 and 2019-2021 to cause such massive increases in shootings? How did these surges differ? What happened in 2016-2019 and 2021-2024 to lower the number of annual shootings from these historic peaks? What causes of shooting violence are not being met, or have changed between periods of violence?

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