Macie Kelly/Houston Public Media
An ambulance at the trauma center entrance of Ben Taub Hospital on July 24, 2019.
City officials on Tuesday unveiled a new online dashboard evaluating firearm-related injuries across Houston. Its developers, including city council member Abbie Kamin, say it shows that unintentional shootings of children are increasing.
The “SAFEWatch” dashboard, which is live on the Houston Health Department website, compiles data from trauma centers, hospital emergency rooms, emergency medical services, law enforcement officers and mortality records to paint a portrait of gun injuries in Houston. A total of $300,000 has been earmarked for developing and maintaining the dashboard, according to Kamin, who led the effort.
“Just to paint the picture for each and every one of us, when a 4-year-old finds an unsecured gun at a friend’s house and pulls the trigger, if that child isn’t killed, they’re rushed to the hospital and provided with lifesaving care,” she said. “That child will eventually go home, experiencing long-term, indescribable trauma. And their family, along with employers and taxpayers, incur astronomical medical expenses. And on top of that, as a city, we may actually never know that the injury actually happened.
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“This dashboard,” Kamin continued, “… has shown us that there is about a 70% gap between hospital visits and what we have in terms of police reports, revealing hundreds of injuries a year; people we couldn’t help because we didn’t know about it.”
Houston Health Department
Houston’s new firearm injury dashboard, as updated on Nov. 5, 2025.
In 2025, for example, the dashboard says 1,874 people have gone to emergency departments with firearm-related injuries, 505 have gone to trauma centers and 454 people have died as a result of gun-related injuries.
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While gun-related injuries that require intensive care have gone down since 2021, Kamin said the number of unintentional shootings of children and young adults are increasing.
Gun safety advocates like Marentha Sargent said the dashboard addresses a crucial lapse in data by addressing unintentional shootings, including geographical data on which communities report the most gunshot injuries.
“We do a lot of work with safe gun storage, and this helps us get more of the real statistics when it comes to what we’re looking for with the unintentional shootings,” said Sargent, whose daughter was killed by an unintentional gunshot wound. “We give away gun safes, and it would be nice to be able to see where the unintentional shootings were happening and what we could do to help that.”
Other experts said the mere existence of the dashboard is a significant step forward for Houston and the nation in general, saying that no such dashboard exists in other major cities.
“We’ve made great advances to improve the health of the city, of the state, of the country over the years, but when it comes to firearms, that’s been a challenge, because the data have been lacking,” said Dr. Alexander Testa, a public health professor at UT Health Houston. “But I think that this dashboard really changes things.”
The dashboard will be updated quarterly: in January, April, July and October.