Visualization that allows for exploration of police killings data from 2015 to 2016 on various filters.
Team Members: Ishan Ranade, Shiv Ahluwalia, Danial Chowdhry, Anton Goncharenko
The Guardian reported that 1092 people were killed by police in the United States in 2016. Police killings are a hot button issue that has become increasingly prevalent in political discourse. We chose police killings as the topic of our project because we wanted to better understand the issue of police killings and potential biases that might cause unexpected trends in reported incidents.
In order to accomplish our task, we took The Guardian's "The Counted" database, which contains information on reported police killings from 2015-2016, and visualized it in a manner that allowed for quick filtering on categories of interest. We chose to create two visualizations. The first visualization focuses on categorizing incidents by county, and also incorporates data from DataUSA about each individual county’s median household income, total population, rural population and unemployment. We sought to shed light on whether or not these county metrics correlated with the number of police killings in that county. Our second visualization focuses on the age, ethnicity, date, and arms associated with an incident, and seeks to allow quick filtering on categories of interest. Hovering over an incident in either visualization's map brings up a tooltip with the name of the deceased and other relevant information.
A demo video of our project can be found here.
By Date |
By Ethnicity |
|---|---|
By Age |
By Arms |
Searching through the first graph on a per county basis, we were not able to find a strong relationship between trends such as unemployment and median household income and number of police killings. However, relating to the second visualization, according to the US Census, it was estimated as of 2015 about 13.3% of the US population is Black or African American. Therefore, it is alarming that 573 out of 2238 victims of police killings are Black, comprising of 25.6% of incidents. Additionally, looking at those who were killed under the age of 20, out of 119 incidents, 53 of those killed were Black, comprising of about 44.5% of incidents in that category. The filters from the second visualization shed light on biases that cause certain groups to be affected disproportionately compared to the percent of the US population they represent. Normalization provides important context to the information conveyed in the visualizations.