Month: February 2025

This week I kept looking into the outlier police stations that had shooting counts that were 3 standard deviations above the mean. Among these police stations I am looking at how many of them are using body cams. I found out that 77% of the outliers did not use body cams. A question I want to ask is “Are body cams being utilized enough to prevent fatal shootings by police officers?”

I am currently investigating the cities containing the police stations that have shot the most people and seeing if there is any correlation there

Going off of Professor Davis’ work where he identified the few police stations that were involved in 80% of the shootings, I plan to analyze the cities that these police stations are located in to see how the shootings were distributed across the cities

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

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.