Published on: 2 September 2024
In this update, ACLED introduces neighborhood level data for Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This allows users to track the local violence dynamics and territorial control in the metropolitan area more effectively and in greater detail.
Impacted data: All events, with the exception of Strategic Developments, within the Port-au-Prince arrondissement, for the entire period of coverage (January 2018 to the present).
Publication date: The data improvements were published on 2 September 2024.
Summary of changes:
Before the change, ACLED aggregated events within the metropolitan area of the Port-au-Prince arrondissement to the commune level in the Locations column, such as “Port-au-Prince – Petion-Ville” and “Port-au-Prince – Delmas”. With this update, ACLED has increased the detail of its location coding to the neighborhood level. Events are now recorded in the Location column with the commune and neighborhood name, for example “Petion Ville – Oasis”, and receive a coordinate central to that neighborhood. The Port-au-Prince arrondissement can now be found and filtered for in the Admin2 column.
The increased detail in location coding also impacts the number of distinct events. Whereas clashes in two neighborhoods of a commune used to be recorded as a single event at the commune level, the new situation allows these events to be recorded as distinct events at the neighborhood level. To maintain the consistency of the dataset, all existing data for Port-au-Prince were examined and cases with multiple incidents across neighborhoods were disaggregated into distinct events.
In total, the update added 304 new events through disaggregation. It corrected 2018 existing events to a more precise neighborhood location, and it introduced 465 distinct neighborhood locations for within the Port-au-Prince arrondissement.
Why are we changing this:
Political violence in Port-au-Prince has very local dynamics and is reported across neighborhoods that each involve different armed groups, in particular local gangs. The introduction of neighborhood level data allows ACLED users to understand and analyze the very local nature of this violence, its dynamics, the actors involved and the territorial control they exert.
Further information:
Consult our Knowledge Base for more on our methodology covering gang violence, or read up on the local situation in our analysis articles on Haiti.
