Over the past ten years, more than 3,400 shootings have happened within 500 feet of a school. This analysis maps over 2,500 schools across New York City to show how enforcing safe school zones can help protect students.
Every NYC school ranked by shootings within 500 feet since 2016. Each incident counts toward every school in range — full exposure, not just the closest.
| # | School | Category | Borough | Shootings ≤500 ft | Students | Nearest |
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This analysis is intentionally conservative and traces back to public NYPD and NYC / NYS education data. Here is what we asked, what we found, and how the numbers should — and should not — be read.
How often does gun violence occur in the immediate vicinity of New York City schools? We define “immediate vicinity” as within 500 feet of a school — roughly one to two city blocks, and the same buffer New York State uses to define a school zone for several public-safety statutes.
This build uses NYPD shooting incidents recorded citywide from January 2016 through December 2025. Each record carries a date, time, borough, precinct, location setting (street, multi-dwelling building, and so on), and a latitude/longitude. NYPD now publishes shootings, victims, and offenders as three linked tables; this map uses the incident-level Shootings table.
data.cityofnewyork.us — Shootings (2006–Present)2,867 active public and non-public school sites citywide. The registry supplies each school's popular and legal name, institution type (public / non-public), grade organization, and county; street addresses were geocoded to coordinates with Geocodio. One record that geocoded roughly 90 miles upstate was dropped as a bad match.
p12.nysed.gov — IRS Directory of Public & Nonpublic Schools (geocoded via Geocodio)Roughly 1.08 million building outlines citywide. Used at display time to place each map dot against the face of a real nearby building, rather than on a rooftop centroid or in the middle of the street.
data.cityofnewyork.us — Building FootprintsAbout 136,500 road-bed centerline segments. Used to spread co-located incidents naturally along the surrounding streets. CSCL is itself published in NY State Plane (EPSG:2263), the same foot-based system used for all distance measurement here.
data.cityofnewyork.us — NYC Street Centerline (CSCL)Boundaries clipped to the shoreline, used for the context outlines and to attribute each school to a borough. From City Planning's “Bytes of the Big Apple.”
data.cityofnewyork.us — Borough Boundaries (DCP)Per-school student enrollment for public and charter schools. Joined to each school by its DOE / charter DBN; the most recent year (2024–25) is used. Published by NYC Public Schools.
infohub.nyced.org — Demographic Snapshot (School tab)Per-school enrollment for non-public (private and parochial) schools, summed across grades. Joined by the 12-digit SED / BEDS code carried for every school; the 2025–26 BEDS-day count is used.
p12.nysed.gov — Nonpublic Enrollment by GradeTo show the true number of incidents without inventing precision the source data doesn't contain, incidents that share an exact coordinate are gently spread across the block around that point. The spread is anchored to real geography: some incidents are placed along the nearest street centerlines, others against the faces of nearby building footprints, with a small deterministic scatter so the pattern reads naturally. Every placed dot is held inside the school's 500-foot ring.
This affects only where a dot is drawn. Every count, distance, ranking, and percentage on this site is computed from each incident's original recorded coordinate — never the display position — so the dots shown inside a school's ring still total its table count. The spreading is purely a way to make a crowded map legible.
The school registry records where schools are, but not how many students attend them — so enrollment was merged in from two official sources: the NYC DOE Demographic Snapshot (2024–25) for public and charter schools, joined on each school's DBN, and NYSED non-public BEDS enrollment (2025–26) for private and parochial schools, joined on the 12-digit SED code. Together these cover 2,708 of the 2,867 schools (94.5%) — 1,898 of 2,056 public/charter and 810 of 811 non-public.
Adding up enrollment across the 1,429 schools with a shooting within 500 feet gives roughly 585,000 students at affected schools — a large share of all students with a known count. Treat this as a floor: 95 of those affected schools (mostly small public sites with no DBN) have no published enrollment, so the real total is higher.
Where a school's count is known it appears in that school's pop-up; where it isn't, the pop-up simply omits the line rather than showing a zero. The public figure is for 2024–25 and the non-public figure for 2025–26 — a one-school-year offset that reflects each source's most recent release.
Across the ten-year record, gun violence sits close to a striking share of New York City’s schools. 1,429 of the city’s 2,867 schools — half (50%) — have had at least one shooting within 500 feet since 2016. Counting only each incident’s single nearest school, 3,401 shootings fall within that zone, at a median distance of just 340 feet.
Exposure is heavily repeat-concentrated: 160 schools have had ten or more shootings within 500 feet. And the burden is geographic — the Bronx (1,211 nearby incidents) and Brooklyn (1,149) carry the largest shares, Manhattan (770) and Queens (233) follow, and Staten Island (38) the least.
Read through enrollment, the human scale comes into focus: the affected schools together enroll roughly 585,000 students — a large share of all students with a known count — who attend a school with a recorded shooting within 500 feet. Because 95 affected schools have no published enrollment, that figure is a floor.
Two cautions keep these numbers honest, and both cut toward caution. They are deliberately conservative: distance is measured to each school’s building point, not its property edge, and the shooting count attributes every shooting only once, to its single nearest school. And they describe exposure and proximity, not casualties — the record captures where and when shots were fired, not who was harmed. Even read that conservatively, the pattern is hard to dismiss: for most NYC schools, gun violence is a neighbor, not a distant event.
This page is a record of what has already happened, not a forecast. The yearly pattern is far from flat: shootings near schools held lower through the late 2010s, surged sharply in 2020–21, and have been receding since. Any projection has to sit on top of that volatility rather than a smooth trend line, which is why we do not publish a single predicted number here.
What the data does support is a planning floor. The 500-foot zone is not hypothetical — it is the same buffer New York State already uses to define a school zone. Applied citywide today, that zone surrounds 1,429 schools and roughly 585,000 students who have already seen at least one shooting at their doorstep. Those are the schools and students a 500-foot safe-zone policy would cover from day one: if the recent decline holds, the number of newly-exposed schools each year falls; if violence climbs again, this is the population that grows first.
Treat the forward-looking read as conditional, not predictive — it describes who is already in range and how that range would respond to the trend, not a guarantee of future counts.
The 500-foot question has a blunt answer. Gun violence is not a rare intrusion at the edge of New York City’s schools — across the 2016–2025 record it is a recurring feature of the blocks most schools sit on, touching half of them and the roughly 585,000 students who attend an affected school. The densest exposure falls on Brooklyn and the Bronx, and on the 160 schools that have each absorbed ten or more shootings within 500 feet.
That 500-foot line is not arbitrary. It is already how New York State draws a school zone for other public-safety laws — this analysis simply asks what that same zone looks like measured against ten years of recorded shootings. The answer is the case for treating the ground immediately around a school as something to actively protect: the schools and students counted here are precisely who a 500-foot safe-zone policy would cover from the day it took effect.