Handguns and Hotspots: Spatio-temporal Models for Gun Crime in Chicago, Illinois.
Date:
Gun violence is a major public health problem in the United States, costing $229 billion dollars annually. It results in the deaths of 31,000 individuals and the non-fatal injury of 78,000 others, mainly concentrated in urban areas. Chicago particularly shows elevated rates of gun violence and gun crime. This research uses cellular automata models informed by data to observe and predict the spatio-temporal spread of gun crime in Chicago, Illinois. We find that poverty, unemployment, and percentage of dependents are significant predictors of gun crimes in a community and also find evidence that gun crime diffuses in an epidemic manner. This characteristic allows us to use tenets from epidemiology to determine how best to deploy intervention techniques. In this talk, I will also discuss how imperative interdisciplinary work has been to this project and how my undergraduate experience in Biomathematics led me to this project.