North Jersey Crime Map May 2009

The month of May is over.

The first month of the crime map experiment is completed, and with it I feel like I have so much more of an understanding of the causes and results of crime.

Sometimes it takes place in the most random of locales – two thoughtless youths aiming a gun at a police officer as they speed down a rural highway. Sometimes it takes place just where you’d expect it to – a man shot in the back of the head and left to die on a Jersey City street. Sometimes it’s the border between the two, between the city and suburbia, where it worries you that sometimes the crime encroaches into the places that you don’t want them to – a man stabbed in his driveway in Lodi, Bergen County.

Sometimes the people who commit the crimes are addicts, like burglars in Sussex and Essex County who stole to feed their addiction. Sometimes, the crimes are accidental, like a man panicking and running from the police, or an 11-year-old girl accidentally shot during a drive-by shooting, or a gang of teenage girls robbing a woman just because they feel like it. These are the crimes anyone around you might do. Sometimes they’re well-planned and organized, like robberies of social clubs and malls, like huge drug rings, like stickups for thousands of dollars.

These crime maps below are divided by county. The towns are shaded as to how many incidents of crime took place within their borders, and select incidents are highlighted to show a sample of the kinds of crime that took place within the county.

Before seeing the actual crime maps, which serve to dehumanize as well as illustrate the human cost of crime, I just want to consider the victims of the twelve murders that took place in North Jersey in the month of May. These are the ones who have lost their lives due to crime, and the ones that should be remembered most. Newark suffered six murders, Jersey City four, and one each in Paterson and East Orange.
Murders
May 5 – Shooting in Newark, man killed with gunshots to chest and head in Vailsburg. One of the people with him was also wounded by the gunfire.
May 6 – Stabbing in Paterson, man stabbed multiple times in Wrigley Park and left to die on the street. He was a 39-year-old with a family.
May 6 – Stabbing in Jersey City, man stabbed in his neck and shoulder in Journal Square. He was murdered in the doorway of his apartment building, in an apparent robbery gone wrong.
May 11 – Shooting in Newark, man killed with gunshot to head in Weequahic, one of his friends also hurt by the gunshots, making it seem to be a gang fight.
May 17 – Shooting in Newark, man killed with gunshot to chest in Weequahic, only blocks from the Beth Israel Medical Center.
May 17 – Strangling in Jersey City, man killed by choking in The Heights. A friend of his was charged with his death, which happened after an argument got out of control.
May 18 – Strangling in Newark, man killed by choking in Newark Bay. He was an inmate at a halfway house, who was only in there for being in debt for traffic violations. He was murdered by two men who strangled him over twenty dollars; the facility didn’t lock its inmates doors at night.
May 24 – Shooting in Newark, man killed by multiple gunshots in South Broad Valley.
May 25 – Shooting in Jersey City, man killed with gunshot to the head in Bergen-Lafayette on a street corner.
May 25 – Shooting in Jersey City, man killed with multiple gunshots to back in Greenville, left for dead on the street.
May 28 – Shooting in East Orange, woman killed with multiple gunshots while sitting in her car in front of an elementary school. The students found her; her ex-boyfriend, the culprit, had committed suicide in his Irvington apartment afterwards.
May 28 – Shooting in Newark, man killed with gunshot to chest in South Broad valley. He was 19.

That being said, here are the crime maps of North Jersey for May of 2009.

Bergen County -
Essex County -
Hudson County -
Morris County -
Passaic County -
Sussex County -