Suicide data part 5

This is the last post in this short series, consisting of 13 charts and two maps. I put all these data together last week for Lincoln's latest suicide prevention coalition, but thought it might be of interest to my blog readers. One of the benefits of posting projects like this on my blog is that it becomes a readily available reference later on. I can get to it quickly with a search, and if send others a hyperlink to the post if I get inquiries in the future, something that has proven quite useful to me over the years.

This final post is the only one that uses data for the past 10 years, rather than the past 20. I don't have geocoded Incident Reports until the late 1990s, so for these maps I used the past decade. The map of suicides simply shows that suicides occur in all parts of the city, with a concentration at the center in Lincoln's historic core.  This is also the area with some of Lincoln's highest population density, though.

The second map combines both suicide and attempted suicide. It also accounts for differences in population density by depicting the rate of these incidents, rather than the number.  Rate is calculated by counting the number of incidents within each of the 2010 census block groups, then dividing that by its population. The red CBGs in the center of Lincoln with high rates also have elevated rates for other kinds of social ills--violent crime, domestic violence, child abuse, drug offenses, registered sex offenders, and so forth. If you search my blog for the GIS tag in the label cloud, and scroll through eight years of posts, you will see many other maps that show a similar pattern.

An outlier, the triangular red area in south Lincoln just south of Highway 2, is a census block group that includes a concentration of moderate income apartments. The two larger orange block groups in northwest and northeast Lincoln are CBGs with comparatively small population denominators, so it doesn't take many incidents to impact the rate. You'll notice lots of yellow down in south Lincoln. Maybe there's something to this.  Click each map for a larger view.