{
  "id": "1994-september-drive-by-shootings-in-tacoma",
  "slug": "1994-september-drive-by-shootings-in-tacoma",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1994-september-drive-by-shootings-in-tacoma.html",
  "year": 1994,
  "month": "September",
  "monthNum": 9,
  "headline": "Drive-by shootings in Tacoma",
  "kicker": "Mean Streets",
  "author_name": "Adam Berliant",
  "author_title": "",
  "affiliation": "The News Tribune",
  "summary": "The News Tribune analyzed drive-by shooting data from Tacoma and Pierce County police using database reporting techniques, discovering approximately 200 incidents over a year rather than the commonly assumed three to four per night, demonstrating how data journalism can produce accurate enterprise stories.",
  "keywords": [
    "database",
    "shootings",
    "reporting"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Crime & Justice",
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Data & Databases"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "XDB",
    "FoxPro",
    "Access",
    "VAX cartridges"
  ],
  "full_text": "Guns, gangs and drive-by shootings. For obvious and unfortunate reasons, violence, the media buzz-word of the '90s, quickly brings these thoughts to mind. But few would deny that among them, there's something particularly disturbing about drive-by shootings.\n\nYou can choose not to own a gun. You can choose not to belong to a gang. But drive-by shootings seem beyond our control. Even worse, we're hearing increasingly how innocent people end up stopping the bullets.\n\nYet year, when The News Tribune ran its eight-day series on crime, \"Beyond Violence,\" Tacoma and Pierce County police could barely provide us with even the vaguest clue about how many drive-by shootings there were in our city, much less how likely it was for bystanders to actually get shot.\n\nThe \"Beyond Violence\" project was time-consuming, titanic in scope and extremely thorough (see Uplink, pt.1993). The series was made possible by a police database containing seven years' worth of violent crime incident reports, about 250,000 records. We proudly squeezed that data until there was nothing left.\n\nFortunately, the feeling was mutual - police were just as eager to track drive-bys as we were. Only a few months before the violence project was published, LESA started tracking drive-bys. By the time the violence project's one year anniversary arrived, the 16-month-old drive-by database was ripe for analysis.\n\nThe News Tribune obtained the drive-by data and also bought an update of the original violent crime database. The total cost was around $200, and the data was supplied in compressed files on four diskettes. (The original, seven-year database came on VAX cartridges.)\n\nAfter spending about a week updating the findings from the previous year, we discarded our original idea to produce a large, follow-up violence project. There simply wasn't much new information we could derive from one year's data that seven years' worth hadn't already made clear last summer. It was hard to get excited about publishing a dozen \"Fill-in-the-blank: One Year Later\" stories when they could probably all read \"ditto.\"\n\nThe drive-by stories were XDB's dying gasp here at the News Tribune. I've always liked XDB even if it was slow, but when I found out the absurd price for upgrades and additional licenses, and when I finally persuaded my editors to let me experiment with FoxPro for a few days, I put good ol' XDB to sleep. Now I'm desperately trying to master FoxPro in time for Access to take over the market. May the wheels of progress continue to smash us flat!\n\nInstead, we used the data to prove, once again, that database reporting can lead to excellent, relatively short enterprise stories.\n\nWe started by determining once and for all that there weren't three or four drive-by shootings every night in Tacoma. The database showed there were 200 incidents over a full year - about one every other night.\n\nThat's why it was so bothersome that we couldn't get real numbers for drive-by shootings. The Law Enforcement Support Agency (LESA), the record-keeping mechanism for both the city and county police that provided The News Tribune with the database, simply didn't bother to categorize drive-by shootings separately. Instead, drive-bys were recorded as assault, vandalism or reckless endangerment.\n\nSo, we were stuck with anecdotes. One police official told us there were so many drive-by shootings in Tacoma that people didn't even bother to report them anymore. Patrol officers guessed that there were as many as four drive-by shootings every night, a shocking figure for any city, but even more so in a town the size of Tacoma.\n\nThe stories and numbers seemed hard to believe, and we were disappointed (to put it nicely) that better information about drive-bys wasn't available.\n\nMore interesting for our readers, though, was that drive-bys weren't the random acts of violence they were perceived to be, and that drive-bys presented little threat to most people. The data proved this in three ways.\n\nFirst, it showed that strangers in strange places were not of much interest to drive-by shooters. The targets of 1 in 3 drive-bys were houses that had been targeted previously. And if the target wasn't one of these \"hot houses,\" then it was the house next door, or some other house on the block.\n\nIn other words, the records showed that the majority of drive-bys occurred on certain streets, in particular parts of town. And, police told us, these parts coincided exactly with the areas of greatest known gang and drug activity.\n\nThe conclusion made by both police and The News Tribune was that if you weren't in a gang, involved with drugs or living next door to someone who was, you didn't have much to worry about.\n\nSecond, the data suggested that drive-by shootings were not increasing, as many people feared. Although we didn't have enough data to report with complete certainty that there was no trend, a month-to-month analysis of what data we did have showed that '94, so far, wasn't any worse than last year.\n\nFinally, the police records indicated that a large portion of drive-by shootings didn't target people at all. We provided a break-out box showing how many of the drive-bys were categorized secondarily as assaults, homicides, reckless endangerment, etc. It showed that 30 percent of all drive-bys were determined by police to be acts of vandalism (40 percent outside city limits). Police sources had a different story than they did a year earlier. Officials were now saying the odds of getting shot by a drive-by were less than being struck by lightning. One police source called the public \"paranoid about getting shot by gang members.\"\n\nIt took only a few hours to complete all the reports necessary to reach these conclusions. Patti Epler, who wrote two stories using the drive-by data, completed her reporting in less than two weeks. We were also able to use the data to include a standard database answer dump: where are the worst parts of town for drive-bys, what's the worst season for drive-bys and what time do the shootings take place.\n\nCall anytime (206)597-8258, or e-mail Berliant@Tribnet.Com",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
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  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1994-september-drive-by-shootings-in-tacoma.html",
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