Today, we commenced our work with a recently acquired dataset from ‘The Washington Post’ website. This dataset sheds light on a troubling statistic: police shootings in the United States result in an average of over 1,000 deaths each year, as revealed by an ongoing investigation by ‘The Washington Post.’
A pivotal moment in this ongoing inquiry was the tragic 2014 killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man, by police in Ferguson, Missouri. This incident exposed a significant issue – the data reported to the FBI regarding fatal police shootings was significantly underestimated, with more than half of such incidents going unreported. This problem has continued to worsen, with only a third of fatal shootings being accurately reflected in the FBI’s database by 2021. The primary reason for this underreporting is that local police departments are not required to report these incidents to the federal government. Additionally, complications arise from an updated FBI system for data reporting and confusion among local law enforcement agencies about their reporting responsibilities.
In response, ‘The Washington Post’ initiated its own comprehensive investigation in 2015, meticulously documenting every instance in which an on-duty police officer in the United States shot and killed someone. Over the years, their reporters have compiled a substantial dataset, which now comprises 8,770 records. This dataset includes various variables, such as date, name, age, gender, whether the person was armed, their race, the city and state where the incident occurred, whether they were attempting to flee, if body cameras were in use, signs of mental illness, and importantly, the involved police departments.
It’s worth noting that this dataset covers incidents from 2015 onwards, and ‘The Post’ recently updated it in 2022 to include the names of the police agencies connected to each shooting, providing a means to better assess accountability at the department level.
In our class today, we delved into some initial questions about this dataset. Notably, we discovered that there are multiple versions of the dataset available. The one accessible on GitHub provides information on police shootings by agencies, but the version directly obtained from ‘The Washington Post’s’ website includes a variable called ‘police_departments_involved.’ This means there’s no need for an external relationship to discover which police stations were involved in these shootings.
As the next step in my analysis, I plan to conduct a more detailed examination of the dataset and its variables to uncover further insights