We began by analysing the data that the Washington Post had gathered on fatal police shootings in the US.
We spoke about the questions in class that would help us come up with a starting point for the analysis.
- How many fatal police shootings occurred between 2015 and 2023?
- How much of a factor does mental illness have in shootings by police?
- Are these deadly police shootings biased towards any particular gender, age, or race?
- Is there a weapon that fugitives use that sees more deadly shots than others?
- Which agency, if any, are involved in more deadly shootings?
We discovered when reviewing the data that we are missing information about the race of the police officers that were engaged in the shooting. Apart from that, we don’t have information on the reason behind the fugitive’s altercation with the police or if the shot was warranted. The absence of this data might impose some restrictions on our study.
In order to validate the observed skewness, I plan to draw histograms for age, latitude, and longitude later in the project to visually portray the data distributions.