Mice vs roaches
The Department of Health doesn't track pest type as a column on its restaurant inspection data. But it's all there in the violation descriptions, parsed by the inspector at the scene. Mice, roaches, flies — the urban biome of NYC's kitchens, since 2024.
Every sustained violation issued by a DOHMH inspector includes a free-text description. There's
no pest_type column you can query directly; the species lives in prose. But once
you parse the 0 pest-related violations issued since 2024, the
breakdown is clear:
Mice and roaches are the marquee. Flies — usually the descriptor "filth flies" — round out the trio at significantly lower volume. Cockroaches outpace mice by a meaningful margin citywide, but the borough-by-borough picture is more interesting.
Below: the share of pest violations that are mice (vs roaches), per borough. Above 50% is mouse-dominant; below is roach-dominant.
The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan tilt one way; Queens and Staten Island the other. The distinction is partly a function of building age and construction (brick row houses vs detached single-family) and partly a function of the kitchens themselves — different cuisines create different waste streams that attract different pests.
None of which means the inspector wrote any of this in their report. They wrote "evidence of live mice" or "evidence of live roaches"; we did the categorical pivot. The DOHMH didn't design its dataset to support pest-mapping. The pest-mapping fell out of it anyway. Open data earning its keep.