Introduction
I decided to do an analysis of police shootings based on race and city. Studies show racism may have an affect on how police deem shooting as a necessary defence mechanism. I wanted to see which races were most heavily shot by police in certain areas and if there was an overwhelming amount of minorities involved.
Hypothesis
Based on what I see in the news, I hypothesize that the data will show that an overwhelming amount of police shooting victims will be of people who are racial minorities. Specifically, black people will have been heavily targeted.
Methodology
To begin, I gathered my data regarding fatal police shootings, since Jan. 1, 2015, from GitHub and entered it into Tableau. I had to create a Tableau Public account in order to make my map available to the public.
I was able to produce the following map showing police shootings based on city and race in the United States.
This map has a legend in the top right corner. It is important to note that H (light blue) indicates hispanic while B (red) indicates black.
Analysis
In looking at the map, it is obvious that some areas have experienced more police shootings than others. For example, we can see a large dot where the city of Chicago is located in comparison to other cities in Illinois. This dot is red which indicates that the majority of shootings targeted black people.
Furthermore, the northern parts of the U.S. seem to have less shootings than the southern parts in general.
When we zoomed out, we can see that red dots, indicating a black person was shot, are most commonly located in the east. On the other hand, light blue dots, indicating a hispanic person was shot by an officer, are more prominent in the west, especially the southwest.
Locatinally, an influx in hispancs occupency makes sense in comparison to the northeast due to its locational relation to the border of Mexico. However, this does not in any way mean that hispanics should be getting shot in these areas more. This seems to show that police officers are targeting minorities in general when it comes to police shootings.
Conclusion
Looking at the map, there are no instances where a large dot is displayed over a city in purple. This would show a large amount of police shootings in the area were of the majority race (white). Therefore, it is obvious that minorities are more often the victims of police shootings. This proves the first part of my hypothesis to be true. Lastly, my hypothesis that claimed that the shootings would mostly consist of black people was not completely true. This statemeant did ring true for a lot of areas in the U.S., specifically the northeast and the city of Chicago. However, the southwest showed more victims were hispanic.
Future Research
Future research could be done on specific states and different regions of states and counties. Others might look at the race of the police officer who shot the victim. This would be interesting to look at while focusing on the idea racism fueling these shootings. Why is it that minorities are constantly the victims of these shootings? Is it coincidence and these people that pose sucha threat just happen to be minorities?