We listen to the city's police, fire and ambulance radio all day, every day. Then we line every call up against the clock, the calendar and the weather, to see what really makes Lubbock busy. Some of it will surprise you.
Calls follow a rhythm. Knowing the day and the hour, we can tell you what the city's radio usually sounds like at this very moment.
Everybody has a theory about what makes a city go wild. We checked seven of them against the radio.
We would normally hear about 57 gunfire reports when it was 75°F or hotter. We heard 55. That is no real difference.
We would normally hear about 28 fire calls during windy hours. We heard 34. That is no real difference.
Alarm calls came in about one and a half times as often while it was raining. We would normally hear about 27. We heard 44.
We would normally hear about 28 crashes while it was raining. We heard 34. That is no real difference.
Fights and disputes came in a bit more often when it hit 90°F. We would normally hear about 181. We heard 210.
Fights and disputes came in a bit more often on weekends. We would normally hear about 295. We heard 353.
We would normally hear about 184 calls on full-moon nights. We heard 187. That is no real difference.
See what time of day it happens, and where in town it shows up most.
We compare fairly. Hot hours are afternoons, and a lot of police calls happen at night. If we just counted, the weather would get the blame for what the time of day did. So for every kind of weather we look at the exact hours it happened, and compare them with the same hours of the same week when the weather was different.
We only count hours we were really listening. If our system was down, that time is thrown out, so an outage can't look like a quiet night.
Busy places are not automatically special. Busy parts of town have more of everything. A place only stands out if one kind of call makes up a bigger slice of its calls than it does across the whole city. On the map, each dot is a square about a mile across.
We don't trust small numbers. When there isn't enough to go on, we say "too early to tell" instead of guessing. This page covers 49 days so far, and it gets sharper every week.
These are calls, not proof. A "gunfire report" means someone called about what they heard. It is not a confirmed shooting, and none of this is official crime data. Weather comes from the hourly readings at Lubbock's airport. More on how the site works.