For twenty years, one in three New York City shootings has landed inside the protected zone that already surrounds every school.
Five hundred feet is about two city blocks. In New York, it is also a line the law already draws — the edge of a school zone, measured around every one of the city’s 2,867 public and non-public schools.
We took every shooting the NYPD has logged since 2006 and asked one question: how often does the gunfire cross that line, into the few hundred feet where children arrive, gather, and head home?
Brooklyn and the Bronx absorb the overwhelming share of the city’s school-adjacent gun violence — together, more than seven of every ten incidents inside a 500-foot zone. Staten Island, at the other end, has fewer than a hundred in twenty years.
School-adjacent shootings fell through the 2010s, bottoming out around 2017–2019 — then 2020 and 2021 erased years of progress in a matter of months. Toggle a borough to see how unevenly that rebound landed.
For every school, we counted the shootings that fall inside its own 500-foot ring. We call that number the school’s exposure. It is the same measure behind the borough tour above — and it reframes the question from “how many shootings” to “how many children stand at the center of them.”
Under that lens, exposure is not rare. 1,837 of the city’s 2,867 schools — 64% — have had at least one shooting inside the ring. The distribution has a long, heavy tail: hundreds of schools cluster at the high end, and sixteen sit inside forty or more.
| School | Borough | Enrollment | Within 500 ft |
|---|
Exposure isn’t scattered evenly across the map. It pools in a handful of police precincts — and almost always on the same kinds of ground.
School locations come from the New York State Education Department registry of public and non-public schools, geocoded to coordinates (2,867 schools citywide). Shooting incidents come from the NYPD via NYC Open Data, “Shootings (2006–Present).” Each incident and school were projected to feet; an incident is “within 500 feet” of a school when it falls inside that radius.
Borough and yearly totals count each incident once (8,152 of 24,126 citywide, 33.8%). A school’s exposure is the number of shootings inside its own 500-foot ring; because rings overlap, neighboring schools can share incidents, so per-school exposure figures should not be summed. Distances are point-to-point. 2026 figures are year-to-date.
Neighborhood demographics (median household income, poverty rate, racial/ethnic composition) are American Community Survey estimates compiled by the NYU Furman Center at the Community District level (2023–2024); they describe the surrounding district, not the school. The share of residents under 18 is drawn from the NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene Community Health Profiles (U.S. Census / ACS population-by-age) for the same district. Citywide reference: median household income ~$84,000, poverty rate ~18%, residents under 18 ~21%.
Sources: NYS Education Department school directory · NYC Open Data — NYPD Shootings 2006–Present · NYC Dept. of City Planning borough boundaries · NYU Furman Center, “State of New York City’s Neighborhoods.”