Insights into Fatal Police Violence in the US (2000–2020)

2020, a year full of pride and prejudice, may completely be a mess to the whole world, bringing people’s attention to the problem of racism again. Among all the incidents, the “Black Lives Matter” movement is a significantly shocking one. Due to the death of George Floyd in the US, such protests spread overall the world, which brings people, including our data visualization team, to the topic: police violence, especially police killing in the United States.

Police violence is not a new stuff for American people. It has been considered to be involved in racism. Protests against police violence to black people just took place in 2014, when Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, was fatally shot by 28-year-old white Ferguson police officer. This project topic is what we picked from many racism disputes in the US to have an insight into American police violence preference.

Data source: https://www.kaggle.com/jpmiller/police-violence-racial-equity

We made use of two datasets in total. One contains the information of the police violence including the race, age and gender of the killed person, the year and location that the incident occurred, the cause of death, etc. Another dataset was extracted from Tax Policy Center that shows the economic status of each State and how their expenditures were distributed on categories including education, public welfare, infrastructure etc.

Our Research Questions:

1. Is there any particular group of people that are more likely to encounter fatal police violence? We wonder if these police officers tend to kill a certain group of people according to their age, race or gender.

2. Do these fatal police violence incidents have some geographic patterns? We want to find how these incidents change through different cities in different states.

3. Is there any factors influence the fatal police violence phenomenon in a certain city or state? Our task is to find if some features of a city can affect the local police killing.