Partners in Peacebuilding

ehind every statistic is a story.

Of a family searching for answers or justice. Of a community rallying for resources in response to senseless shootings. Of a loved one lost to gun violence.

Those stories often go unheard in the greater narrative of gun violence. As mass shootings and other high-profile crimes dominate headlines, community violence tends to get pushed aside as an unfortunate reality of American life.

A Swarthmore project is trying to alter that narrative. Launched this fall, the Delaware County Homicide Database (delcohomicides.swarthmore.edu) is an online dashboard and interactive map that tracks all violent deaths in Pennsylvania’s fifth-most-populous county, the vast majority of which are firearm-related. Created by students under the guidance of Professor of Peace & Conflict Studies and Sociology Lee Smithey, the database aims to assist in the prevention of gun violence while painting a fuller picture of the effects of firearms.

The project is a peacebuilding effort in partnership with advocacy groups, Smithey says — developed in collaboration with members of the local community, and informed by their personal experiences.

“When I look at that map, I probably tend to see it as a sociologist first, and I start thinking about proximity to the interstate, the income level in these various neighborhoods, etc.,” says Smithey, who is also coordinator of Swarthmore’s Peace & Conflict Studies Program. But residents of areas where gun violence is pervasive, he says, “see a mosaic of stories and individuals and people, and they know that many of these homicide events are related to one another. It opened our eyes to how this information is going to tell a different story to different people.”

Shootings claimed the lives of more than 15,000 Americans in 2019, not including suicides, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks firearm casualties nationally; 2020 saw the highest number of firearm deaths in more than two decades, with nearly 20,000 fatalities, and 2021 was on pace to approach or exceed that figure.

In Delaware County, the Swarthmore database shows, 28 homicides were recorded in 2019, the most recent year for which local statistics are available. The map accompanying the data illuminates hot spots in lower income and more highly populated parts of the county, in line with trends for community gun violence nationwide.

For years, local anti-violence organizations have worked to draw attention to the issue, in hopes of advancing state gun legislation and bringing interventions to the areas that need it most. But data collection can be a challenge for the groups’ volunteers, as they balance full-time jobs with their advocacy work. “It’s really hard to go and ask for resources when you don’t have the backup data,” says Jess Frankl of Delaware County United for Sensible Gun Policy, or Delco United, a legislation-focused advocacy group that partnered with Smithey and his students on the database project.

The dashboard has elevated the conversation. “It helps a group like ours to go to our elected representatives and say, look, you know there’s a problem — the numbers do not lie,” says Frankl. “Here’s where the problem is and here’s who it’s hitting and here’s what you’re not doing to fix it.”

The statistics also help proponents as they engage with members of their own communities — or with those who are against their cause, adds John Linder, who co-chaired Delco United with Frankl from 2018 to 2021. (The nonprofit, which was co-founded by Robin Lasersohn ’88 and her husband, Terry Rumsey, became a chapter of the statewide organization CeaseFirePA early last year.)

“We have to get accurate data, share it with people from the community, and teach what it means,” says Linder, a professor at Delaware County Community College who served as mayor of Chester, Pa., from 2012 to 2016. “If we educate, we have a chance to eliminate. If we educate, we have a chance to motivate. If we bring to people’s awareness what is bothering them, we’ve got the greatest chance of them taking the medicine that is prescribed for them.”

It might be surprising to discover that a database like Swarthmore’s didn’t already exist for Delaware County; with the amount of information available on the internet, it’s easy to assume that anti-violence groups had all the data. Smithey points out, however, that although limited statistics are readily attainable through law enforcement agencies, they are rarely presented in a way that’s easy for the public to process. By utilizing the College’s technological and scholarly resources, Swarthmore students served as research assistants for the local groups, supporting them in their advocacy.

“We tried our best to give our community partner organizations the most information they can possibly get in order to do their job better and make our communities safer,” says Oliver Hicks ’22, a political science and peace & conflict studies major from San Luis Obispo, Calif., who worked on the project. “Gun violence is not a series of isolated incidents. It’s a systemic problem of pandemic-level proportions.”

For the database, students downloaded homicide information from the Pennsylvania Uniform Crime-Reporting System and then cross-checked their findings against local news reports to glean further details about each case, such as the specific locations of the shootings. Dashboard users can search gun deaths in the county going back to 2005, while filtering by such demographics as victims’ age, sex, and race, and applying map overlays including median income per area.

The project drew inspiration from the work of photojournalist, activist, and educator Jim MacMillan, who launched a similar site tracking gun deaths in Philadelphia. A former journalist-in-residence with Swarthmore’s War News Radio and former manager for media and responsibility for the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, MacMillan is the founding director of the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting, which emphasizes the importance of including community voices in the coverage of fatal shootings.

Smithey builds on this idea in his Gun Violence Prevention course, through which the homicide database was developed over five nonconsecutive semesters. As part of the course — which explores gun violence from the perspectives of public health, policy, law enforcement, prevention advocates, even gun enthusiasts — community partners and survivors of gun violence are frequent guest speakers, often sharing how they’ve been personally affected by firearms.

“For me, the course was really about humanizing both the living and, unfortunately, deceased victims of gun violence,” says Aleina Dume ’23, a sociology and educational studies major from Queens, N.Y., who took Gun Violence Prevention during last winter’s January term; the course is being offered again in the fall. One particularly impactful speaker for Dume was Beverly Wright, a mother from Chester who lost her son, Emein, to gun violence in 2005. In response to that tragedy, Wright formed the group Women of Strength United for Change, which provides support for families suffering similar losses and works to advance gun policy to prevent future violence.

“Hearing her story, but also about her grassroots activism, really helped me remember that these are lives that we’re entering into this database,” Dume says. “We might not know this person’s name, but that just speaks to how important the work is.

“As a person of color in this class, and as a woman, I think about how Black women and mothers are so often on the front lines of gun violence protests and advocacy. How can we make sure that the right voices are being uplifted?”

One way, advocates say, is simply to listen.

After consulting with community members like Wright, Smithey’s students decided against using pinpoints for each death in the database, to avoid reducing each victim to a statistic. Instead, the information is presented as a heat map, with areas growing more saturated in color as the number of cases increases.

“Having those conversations is so important, and listening is way harder than talking,” says Frankl, who is now on the board of CeaseFirePA while working for an insurance company. “For Lee to have the initiative to say, you know what, we think we know what we’re doing here, but let’s get an outside ear because these are the people really being affected, and to take that and find ways to change it — no matter how much work it might be from a tech standpoint — that was so important.”

Linder experienced firsthand the importance of listening during his term as Chester’s mayor. While working to reduce the crime rate within Delaware County’s only city, Linder made a practice of visiting every victim of gun violence in the hospital. There, he communicated between doctors and family members and offered comfort to loved ones during times of extreme panic and grief. Half a decade later, Linder says, people still tell him how much the gesture meant.

“I at some point would know someone in their family — a parent or an uncle or aunt that I went to college with,” says Linder, who was born and raised in Chester and attended Widener University there. “Someone once asked me, ‘Why did you put yourself through that?’ I said, ‘I didn’t put myself through anything. I did what I thought was the responsible thing to do.’

“Even the quote-unquote bad guy, the drug dealer who was shooting — they belong to somebody. … Something that I don’t think the young people realize when they’re engaged in it is that that shooting, that death, that’s final.” By connecting with people — whether they’re young people in Chester, students at Swarthmore, or opponents of gun legislation — Linder says he gains ground in the fight against firearms.

As a lifelong resident, Linder understands Chester’s current challenges, including a lack of jobs, poor educational opportunities, and a high crime rate. But he also sees signs of hope for the city that he loves, including a sharp drop in shootings reported last summer, attributed partly to the Chester Partnerships for Safe Neighborhoods, a community-engagement program launched by District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer.

What outsiders don’t always realize about Chester, Linder says, “is that most of the people there abhor gun violence. We think because it happens, people outside think everybody goes for that. Everybody doesn’t go for that.”

What residents want, he says, is a safe and quiet community where everyone can live without the fear of crime. As Linder often tells opponents of firearm legislation: “I don’t want your gun. What I want is your commitment that we’re going to work together to stop people from taking our lives.”

Swarthmore’s homicide database has the potential to help reduce gun violence by allowing advocates to monitor trends across the county. “We can see when it’s getting better, when it’s getting worse,” Frankl says. “We want to know what’s being done: Are the interventions that are being put in place actually working and getting to the people who need it?”

But it is also expected to be useful to trauma surgeons, public health workers, and local governments. Before the pandemic, Pennsylvania officials invited Smithey, Frankl, and Linder to Harrisburg to discuss tracking gun deaths on a statewide level. The hope is that Swarthmore’s project will inspire additional databases — created for other counties, perhaps by other colleges.

“It is just amazing how we have constantly run into leaders who want to talk about this,” Smithey says. “And it can be rewarding for students — many just took a class because they thought Gun Violence Prevention would be interesting, and then they realize we’re actually doing something that people say that they need.”

The database is also likely to evolve along with those needs. One idea is for the site to eventually include an “in memoriam” section, where loved ones could honor victims with photos and tributes. “The students are rightly interested in humanizing this data as much as possible,” Smithey says, “and so we imagine soliciting descriptions of victims by surviving family members, if they wish, in a totally voluntary way.”

That addition would only bolster the efforts of anti-gun-violence advocates, Frankl says. Never a numbers person, even during her time leading Delco United, Frankl instead felt drawn into action by the victims and survivors themselves, by their personal narratives of tragedy, perseverance, and triumph.

“It never stuck with me until I connected it to the lives being lost, until I had their stories, until I had the bigger picture of what was happening,” Frankl says. “And that’s what I love so much about how Lee did this. He didn’t rush it and say, I’m busy, I have other things to do, let’s get this up on a website. He did it with multiple classes and educated the students on the bigger scope of the problem. He brought in community members and got their point of view. It was done in the right way.”