Uncovering Data on Firearms Recovered in Hartford

While hundreds of illegal firearms are confiscated in Hartford every year, there persists a staggering lack of publicly-available information on these guns. This has provided a considerable challenge to our community partners, CT Against Gun Violence and Hartford Communities That Care, two local organizations committed to reducing gun violence. In our research, we aim to remedy these informational deficiencies and provide data which will support their advocacy efforts. Our research was guided by three specific questions: First, what types of firearms are recovered in Hartford? Second, what criminal offense is associated with each recovered weapon? Finally, what is the geographic distribution of these recovered firearms? From the Major Crimes Unit of the Hartford Police Department, we obtained data on six hundred and forty-five firearms recovered in the city between January 1, 2018 and October 26, 2019. We subsequently consolidated and visually represented this data in a more accessible format than the complex Excel sheets and crime reports we received. As our final product, we analyzed and visualized the emerging trends in order to deliver our community partners useful visualizations of this previously inaccessible data