About The Site
The New Jersey Gang Survey Viewer is a visualization tool for the New Jersey State Police Street Gang Survey 2007. The site was developed by five volunteers over a weekend in December 2009, with the help of New Jersey State Police analysts. Our goal was to elevate public knowledge about street gang presence in New Jersey, USA, based on the 2007 survey of the 562 municipalities in the state. (Raw Data)
This is a work in progress. We accomplished all we could in two days and hope to add more to the site leading up to the 2010 street gang survey release.
This gang survey data is relevant to a wide range of New Jersey residents and visitors to the state. The current perception of ‘gang threat’ is frequently one that is primarily urban and particularly violent. This has implications for both government and society at large. On the one hand, residents of non-urban communities may notice a lack of violent crime and thus conclude that gangs are not present in their towns. As a result, this belief that gangs are someone else’s problem — and someone else’s tax burden — could potentially reduce public support for anti-gang initiatives that go beyond an initial impulse to “lock ‘em all up.” Innovative gang reduction policies designed to have a long-term impact on the spread of gang culture may thus encounter significant obstacles to widespread acceptance because of tacit perceptions that gangs and gang violence are limited to New Jersey’s cities.
Gangs are reported present in dozens of rural and suburban municipalities throughout the state. Almost seven out of every ten New Jerseyans live in a municipality where gangs can be found. Clearly, gangs can not be considered an exclusively urban phenomenon in any part of New Jersey.
For inquiries, contact Josh Tauberer.
Credits
The NJ Gang Survey Viewer was created by volunteer civic hackers Nick Cazoneri (Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission), Robert Cheetham (Avencia), Don Coleman (Chariot Solutions), David Middlecamp (Avencia), and Joshua Tauberer (Civic Impulse), and from the New Jersey State Police Dean Baratta, intelligence analyst, and Peter Lynch. We were hosted at Avencia and the site is hosted by Civic Impulse.
Our weekend work was the Philadelphia site of the Great American Hackathon 2009, a call to work on civic technology projects by Sunlight Foundation, a DC-based government transparency nonprofit.
We’re looking for help. If you are interested in working with New Jersey gang and crime data, please contact Josh Tauberer.
Survey Limitations
The New Jersey State Police gang survey measures perceptions of the New Jersey gang environment by police agencies at the municipal level. Survey data was collected by interviewing local police officers.
- Responses are subjective, reflecting an individual survey respondent’s perception based on his/her training and experience. For example, an officer who has received gang awareness training may be more likely to report the presence of gangs in his or her jurisdiction if he or she is able to interpret signs of gang presence that other officers do not notice.
- In addition, depending on the circumstances of a particular time and place, a political rationale may exist to either deny –or exaggerate– the presence of gangs. Therefore, survey responses may — or may not — represent the ‘official’ position of a particular police department or municipal administration.
- Although questionnaires asked about gang activity in the previous 12 months, respondents may have subconsciously thought in terms of other crime reporting mechanisms which use the calendar year. In either case, survey responses about gang criminality may not be strictly comparable to crime statistics such as the FBI Uniform Crime Reports.