Exploratory Data Analysis

A couple of questions that I came away with while looking at the data:

• What are the qualifications to use lethal force for each police station?
• What were the repercussions for the officers when they killed the person?
• Are certain threat types more common among specific racial or age groups?
• How many people were listed as unarmed at the time of the shooting?
•  Are unarmed individuals more likely to belong to certain demographic groups?
• What percentage of people shot by police while holding a replica weapon were under the age of 25?

Like many in the class what first caught my attention was the body cam. I didn’t do the exact math but sorted it and looked at the number and total number and seen less than 20 percent where actually on. I definitely want to do what you were talking about in class each location. But my thought process I want to see how often is these body cams off in a urban, low poverty area. I know it would be a lot to do whole country so like Massachusetts and the bigger states like NewYork,Texas Florida and California. And see how often body cams actually on in those worsened areas. (See comment from Gary Davis)

• I noticed that White people are the largest group overall, but Black
  and Hispanic people also make up a big portion of the victims.
  Do we notice some races appearing more often in certain states
  compared to others?
  • I noticed that body cameras were not used most of the time.
  My question is does the presence of a body camera change how
  shootings happen?
  • I noticed that shootings happen all across the country.
  My question is which states have the highest number of shootings,
  and which have the lowest?
  • I noticed that body cameras are not used in an overwhelming
  majority of cases.
  My question is are certain states or counties more likely to use
  body cameras than others?
  • I noticed that many victims were listed as armed, but some were
  unarmed.
  My question is does the type of weapon (gun, knife, vehicle,
  unarmed) vary a lot by state?
  • I noticed that some cases were marked as involving mental illness.
  My question is are certain states more likely to have shootings
  involving mental illness than others?
  • I noticed that shootings have increased over the years.
  My question is which year had the biggest jump in cases?

Is there a correlation between race and the “armed with” category? From this question there was other correlations that I got curious about. From the columns; threat_type, flee_status, and armed_with is there a correlation between these three or even two of three if there’s any trend to notice.

Shootings classified as “accidental” seem on the face of it to involve a high proportion of Latino and Black people. Is this so? Are these proportions out of step, or in line with, the overall proportion of these ethnicities in the general population, or of these ethnicities in the population of people shot by police. Where are the “accidental” shootings located?

Noticed body cams are most often turned off. Where are the locations of the police stations for those officers whose body cameras were off during a shooting?

Question 1: How do the police shootings vary with time? Day, week, month?

Question 2: Are there instances of multiple shootings at the same time and same place?

Where are the locations of people who did not flee? (See the comment from Gary Davis)

What do the shooting classifications mean? (Note: this may be available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ or at the Washington Posts’ github site.)

Were the mental illness classifications done by police on the spot, or by accessing medical records? We probably cannot know, so how important is the mental illness classification?