Highest NYC bite rate among mapped breeds: Pit Bull type (Am. Pit Bull Terrier / mixes, as self-reported), all years combined

as of 2026-09-20 · license: public-domain

• One city only (NYC); breed labels are self-reported by the bite-report filer and by the owner at licensing, not verified.
• The denominator is active licences, and NYC licence compliance is far from universal, so the absolute rate overstates bites per dog owned for every breed; read it as a ranking, not a probability.
• Relative to the rate across all 34 mapped breeds combined (24 per 1,000 licences), this breed is 5.39x.
• Breeds whose owners licence less often (or more often) than average will have their rate inflated (or deflated) by that difference; the data cannot separate biting from licensing behaviour.
• Only 34 breeds have a defensible name join between the two datasets; this covers 44% of all recorded bites and 48% of all license rows.
• 'Unknown'/blank breed accounts for 27% of all NYC bite reports -- the single largest bite category, larger than any named breed.
• Licensed-dog counts are active-license snapshots per extract year, not a true owned-dog population, so this is a rate per active license, not per dog alive in the city.

Source

SwampLink (computed from NYC DOHMH open data) — NYC bite rate per 1,000 licensed dogs, by breed and year
https://data.cityofnewyork.us/
retrieved 2026-09-20

Method

bites / licensed dogs * 1000, summed across all extract years, joined via the committed breed-name map

n = 33786

from: data/nyc-bites.json, data/nyc-licenses.json, scripts/breed_name_map.py

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