Friday 7th January, 2024

From my explorations on mental illness cases I mentioned in my last post, here are my results:

Fatal Police Shootings Where The Victim Was Suffering A Mental Illness During The Altercation

Black Males – 16.49%

Black Females – 1.28%

White Males – 57.17%

White Females – 4.92%

Asian Males – 2.25%

Asian Females – 0.32%

Hispanic Males – 14.99%

Hispanic Females – 0.54%

 

White males are the most overrepresented group in the dataset, making up over half the population. But when you look proportionally to the population of the United States, Black and Hispanic males also become overrepresented.

 

 

Proportional Representation

Black Males

 16.49%/6% x 100 = 274.8333 %

 

White Males

57.17%/30% = 190.5667% 

 

Hispanic Males

14.99%/8% x 100 = 187.375 %

 

Method

To do this I used the sub setting function, combined with logical operations to capture a subset of each demographic

Friday January 31st, 2025

Black men with mental illness have been historically mistreated in the United States and I have been investigating if there is any evidence of that in the dataset. To do this I am checking if black men with mental illness are being disproportionately represented in the dataset, when compared with the total population of the United States.

I am also looking at the “threat_type” variable compared with the “armed_with” variable. If a person is threatening a policeman by pointing at them, but they are only armed with a blunt weapon, that is not a valid reason to use lethal force and if this happens repeatedly, then it is a problem that should be recorded/reported.

 

 

Friday January 24th, 2025

This week, we are working on a dataset compiled by the Washington Post about fatal police shootings in the United States. This dataset contains information like the name of the victim, their location, the police department responsible for the shooting and more. Using this dataset, our goal for the week is to pose a question about the data and use the dataset to answer that question. The answer of that question will then lead to more questions. I chose to investigate what state had the most frequent shootings and found that it was California. There are further questions this poses, like :

a.) What race of people were most frequently shot by police in California?

b.) What police department in California was involved in the most shootings?

c.) What percentage of people shot by police departments in California were armed?

I will be exploring these questions and more in the coming weeks.