I wanted to see the general characteristics of the victims and the crimes from fatal shootings along the West coast. Wanted to see how race, gender, body cam presents, and mental illness were related to the crimes.
R programming language and R markdown was used for this project to clean, mine and statistically analyze the data. The statistical method used throughout this project are three way contingency tables. To start the project I loaded the public .CSV file and filled all the black cells in the data with “undetermined.” I then created a stored table to show what states have the most victims in these fatal shootings. From the data California is the state with the most fatal shootings so I wanted to see if it was all the same across the West coast.
I then selected the data to remove id, county, city, name, flee_status, latitude, longitude, location_precision, race_source, agency_ids. Then filtered the data to show only the states California, Oregon, and Washington State. Along with gender of male and female and the date to go up until 12/31/2022. From there I created 4 contingency tables regarding. The first two show the estimated proportions for age and the genders. The other two tables are three way contingencies that show the relations between race, gender, body cam or mental illness.
Findings I have found, Hispnisc and Whites make up the majority of victims on the West coast. In addition, the victims are a heavy majority of male. I also found that body cams are very commonly not used at the time of these crimes and mental illness is not normally found in the time for the victim’s death.
There seems to be a bigger population in hispaics and whites on the West coast. There are also a lot more fatal shootings on the West coast with California as number 1. There is no relations in crimes and the body cams but may be an issue in general for scociety when it comes to fatal police shootings. Now regading mental illness, I believe there could be a slight correlations because the data also includes mental distress under mental illness. I belive if the two were distinguished we can get a better understanding how police interactions may affect the victims.
Some thoughts on how to improve the project and some suggestions on the data.
Improvements: I want to come back and revisit this project and would like to add a data visualization on a specific state or specific gender or race. I would like to do a deep dive on one state alone. Also would like to take a look at how the victims' ages are related to the crimes. What age is more susceptible to these crimes?
Suggestions on the data: I would like to know more on the police officers who were a part of the crime. Would like to know their active status, prior offenses if any, race, gender and race.