There are many great combinations throughout the history of the world: salt & pepper, PB&J, cheese & crackers, Shaq & Kobe, a burger & fries, pizza & coca-cola… the list goes on.
Illegal Fireworks and Urban Areas are not one of those great combinations.
According to the New York Times, The sale of all fireworks in New York State was made illegal in 1909 and remained illegal for over 100 years until 2014, when “sparkling devices” were made legal1 in order to bring in more tax revenue for the state. Both firecrackers and aerial fireworks are still illegal under NY state law.
The danger of fireworks is often understated and underestimated. Every year since 1976, between 7,000 and 16,000 people have been injured by fireworks in the United States.2 While I was unable to find statistics regarding injuries in NYC, structural fires have long been a problematic result of the behavior including over 1,000 fires in 1989 alone.3
Despite its legality (or lack therof), videos are often posted of backyard firework shows within the limits of New York City. I have seen and heard them from my own window and rooftop.
I’ve always found it interesting that people go through the hassle of driving all the way to Pennsylvania in order to break the law for simple entertainment purposes. In looking at the data, I hoped to explore what I consider to be a unique type of antisocial behavior – an antisocial behavior that is often, by nature, social.
The data cited is from NYC’s “311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present: NYC Open Data.” 311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present | NYC Open Data portal. I queried the data in order to narrow down to “Illegal Fireworks” as the complaint type, and created several visualizations below to illustrate my findings.
And so, begins my look into the data of illegal firework usage in NYC.
It seems as though the embedded visualizations do not open full screen, so here is my Tableau Public Profile: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/xavier.mccormick/vizzes
A Geographic Overview
This map shows the number of illegal firework reports by zip code from 2010 to 2024 by zip code. I recommend opening it full screen in order to better be able to read it!
My original intention with this graph was to plot all of the unique reports with pins on a map, but with over 90k records, it would have looked like a mess. I decided to display the incident reports by zip code as they are more detailed than borough & was easy enough to overlay into Tableau. I also decided to display the numbers on this chart as they help contextualize the overall visualization.
Next, I decided to look into the Police Responses to Different these 311 reports.
In order to look at this data, I first made a simple table to split out the data in order to easily read it. It’s in image format as there is nothing unique about it as a Tableau Workbook.
I split that data by borough & visualized it as a bar graph. I think it’s an easy way to understand the relative scale of the behavior in each of the respective boroughs. I was curious to see if there were discrepancies in the behavior by borough. Interestingly enough, 21/34 arrests were in the Bronx despite far less incidents than both Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Finally, I was curious to see when these reports primarily had taken place, and was curious as to the impact the COVID-19 Pandemic had on the behavior.
Clearly, the COVID-19 pandemic had a MASSIVE impact on the behavior. I used a line graph as it was the most effective way to display the change in incident reports over time.
This chart looked at the firework usage by month without splitting it by year. I thought it did a great job of illustrating the seasonality of firework usage with most of it coming during summer months.
I was curious to see if there were any days that had disproportionately high incident reports and created this bubble chart:
When scrolling across the chart – most of the days surround the Fourth of July or took place over the summer in 2020. A few of the medium sized dots surround New Years, but the chart is dominated by the 4th of July and the summer of 2020. This chart echoes that:
Regarding limitations, I was a bit frustrated by my inability to display individual pin points on a map of all of the incidents by using the longitude and latitude on each of the records. I couldn’t crack that despite a couple hours of research.
I also found some of the visualization formats a bit limiting in their ability to display the details through text of some of the data types, especially within the commons site.
Regarding next steps, I would be interested in looking at other crime data by neighborhood and incident reports. While I’m sure someone is looking at it, I would love to see incident reports for violent crimes visualized by neighborhood and contextualize different types of crime across similar factors (seasonality, geography, police response, etc.)
However, I think this is it for my research into illegal firework usage in NYC.
Sources:
1) Turkewitz, Julie. “Manhattan’s Illegal Fireworks, a Tradition of Boom and Bust.” The New York Times, July 3, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/nyregion/manhattans-illegal-fireworks-a-july-4-tradition-american-independence-day.html
2) Fireworks-Related Injury Rates, 1976-2022, www.americanpyro.com/assets/docs/FactsandFigures/2023/Fireworks%20Related%20Injuries%20(table)%201976%20-2022.pdf. Accessed 3 Mar. 2024.
3) Santora, Marc. “Bangs and Booms on the 4th: Fireworks, the Illegal Kind, Don’t Disappear.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 5 July 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/07/05/nyregion/bangs-and-booms-on-the-4th-fireworks-the-illegal-kind-dont.html.
4) “311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present: NYC Open Data.” 311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present | NYC Open Data, data.cityofnewyork.us/Social-Services/311-Service-Requests-from-2010-to-Present/. Accessed 2 Mar. 2024.
