Also from the “closing my tabs” department, this is good stuff.
CM Abbie Kamin
If a person shows up at an emergency room with a gunshot wound, but it’s never reported to the police, did it really happen?
If you’re looking solely at Houston Police Department data, the answer would be no. That’s because most firearm-related injuries recorded in hospital emergency rooms and trauma centers aren’t the result of robberies or aggravated assaults. Doctors regularly treat hundreds of victims of accidental shootings, self-harm and domestic violence each year. Ensuring those shootings don’t go uncounted is vital to solving Houston’s epidemic of gun violence.
A new gun violence database that went live this month on the Houston Health Department website aims to change that. The dashboard, SAFEWatch, is one of the first in the nation to integrate and map out data from the police department, hospitals, trauma centers, EMS and medical examiner records. The result is a more complete accounting of firearm-related injuries and deaths since 2019.
The idea for a database was spearheaded by City Council Member Abbie Kamin, who secured federal funding and her own district funds to foot the $300,000 cost of compiling a massive amount of data. She noted that there is a 70% gap between shootings reported by HPD and hospital-level data.
That discrepancy between police and hospital records is alarming. Between 2019 and 2025, there were more than 25,000 firearm-related emergency department and trauma center visits, compared to 5,867 firearm-related injuries reported by police.
Those numbers shouldn’t be interpreted as a failure by law enforcement to account for gun violence. The dashboard simply underscores that hospital and trauma center data, as well as ambulance calls, capture gun violence that doesn’t make it into the criminal justice system.
The goal, Kamin told the editorial board, is to reframe gun violence in Houston as a public health crisis.
“This is a hyper-intentional effort with our partners at the medical center to ensure this isn’t just a dashboard with information, but that this is actionable,” Kamin told the editorial board.
Kamin said the data will be updated quarterly and that SAFEWatch stakeholders will have standing meetings to examine data trends that inform policy solutions.
Fostering this level of collaboration will be critical for shaping policies that supplement traditional police work by targeting violence prevention and intervention. It’s not a doctor’s job to discern a criminal motive when a person with a gunshot wound is on their operating table, nor is the victim always willing to provide that information. And police officers can’t be expected to be at the scene every time a gun is fired, accidentally or intentionally.
Our hope is that the dashboard will bring hospitals, social service agencies and law enforcement to the table to guide public safety policies that go beyond street-level policing.
The original story on the dashboard is here and the dashboard itself is here. The first rule of data and metrics is that if you can’t measure something accurately, you can’t effectively change it. I didn’t know before this idea was being pushed by CM Kamin that this disconnect between the number of police reports on gun violence and the actual number of gun violence incidents existed. I totally assumed that any time someone showed up at a medical facility with a gunshot wound that it was reported to the police. Closing that gap is a real accomplishment, one that I hope other cities emulate. Whatever does or doesn’t follow as a result of this is a secondary concern for now. Because at least now, we know what the real numbers are. And that matters. Kudos all around.