When Peguese, 26, was shot in his car in Pittsburgh three days after Christmas, his death helped set a record. By the time the coroner was done counting, Allegheny County had 125 homicides in 2003. Pittsburgh's murder rate of 21 per 100,000 residents last year was on par with Miami and Chi- cago. Suburbanites lamented they could no longer go downtown at night for a play or a concert with- out risking their lives.
I was assigned to do an investiga- tive report on the rising murder rate, and I was skeptical about the conventional wisdom. From my shifts on the weekend rotation, I knew there was a good chance on any given Saturday that I would be chasing down a murder in the projects. Like the Peguese case, these usually involved a young black man shooting another young black man. Often, there were no witnesses.
The incident would get a couple paragraphs the next day, and we moved on. Although only 11 percent of Al- legheny County residents are black, they accounted for three- quarters of homicide victims last year. Statistics also show that black victims were usually killed by blacks, while whites were killed by whites. Fewer than one in 10 ho- micides involved a white person kill- ing a black person, or vice versa.
When I looked at homicides going back to 1990, I found another trend. Both in the early '90s and now, when the rate of killings rose, it was pushed by an upsurge of black vic- tims. Police say this phenomenon tracks with the influx of first crack cocaine and now heroin. The casu- alty tally for whites hovered near 30 for each year through the decade, but for blacks it fluctuated from 36 in 1991 to 91 in 2003.
If we were going to run a big story about murder, then we needed to be clear about the problem. Down- town Pittsburgh isn't Disneyland, but neither is it a nest of armed mug- gers waiting in alleys to rob and kill their victims. The problem is local- ized in a few outlying neighborhoods most people don't venture into, and the law-abiding people who live there are highly unlikely to be vic- tims. Residents of Homewood, the city neighborhood with the most shootings, repeatedly told me they felt safe there.
It concerned me that using these stark statistics could lead some to think I was playing up racist stereo- types. I needed to put the numbers in a way nobody could argue with, so readers could absorb this detail fully and move on to thinking about why it happens, what it means, what can be done, and why they should care. The best way to do that was with a map. First, I supplemented a Microsoft Ex- cel spreadsheet our crime reporter was keeping on each homicide with information from the coroner's log book.
In the end, I had a database showing the address of where the body was found for every homicide in 2003, along with demographic infor- mation such as age, gender and race for each victim and for those arrested for the crimes. I saved the Excel sheet in dBASE IV format, imported it into an ESRI ArcView 3.2 project and geocoded the crime scene addresses to create murder location points. The results showed the clustering of killings.
Because the crime addresses were often vague, without even a general- ized street number, I had to plot about 50 of the 125 dots by hand. Then used the Legend Editor to color the dots based on whether the victim was coded "B" for black or "W" for white in the database. (Unlike most U.S. cit- ies, Pittsburgh has a minuscule His- panic population and they didn't fig- ure in the statistics.) Finally, I used Add Theme to pull in a Census 2000 map of Census block groups shaded by racial demographics to show the minority neighborhoods.
series the newspaper published in July. (You can find it in the "Special Reports" section of our main page at www.triblive.com.) The final product was featured in "Murder in the Streets," a two-day The map made clearer than words could why the stories focused ex- clusively on black murders. Most of the voices I used were black, from the veteran homicide detective from the projects to the accused pusher worried about his safety on the streets.
Or that of two teenage boys in a Pittsburgh ghetto and their uncles, one of whom sits in prison for killing the other in a gang shoot- ing a decade ago. The headline, "Black Death," was coupled with a moving photo of a mother in a funeral home caressing the chest of her dead son, a crack dealer who was shot off his bike. The map inside revealed the numbers, but the impact of the front page re- inforced the stories main purpose, which was to report the news we often overlook and remind readers that many victims are not innocents.
Each was somebody's child. Contact Mark Houser by e-mail at mhouser@tribweb.com.