Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 1,173 civilians having been shot, 248 of whom were Black, as of December 2024. In 2023, there were 1,164 fatal police shootings. Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 6.1 fatal shootings per million of the population per year between 2015 and 2024. Police brutality in the U.S. In recent years, particularly since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, police brutality has become a hot button issue in the United States. The number of homicides committed by police in the United States is often compared to those in countries such as England, where the number is significantly lower. Black Lives Matter The Black Lives Matter Movement, formed in 2013, has been a vocal part of the movement against police brutality in the U.S. by organizing “die-ins”, marches, and demonstrations in response to the killings of black men and women by police. While Black Lives Matter has become a controversial movement within the U.S., it has brought more attention to the number and frequency of police shootings of civilians.

The rate of fatal police shootings in the United States shows large differences based on ethnicity. Among Black Americans, the rate of fatal police shootings between 2015 and December 2024 stood at 6.1 per million of the population per year, while for white Americans, the rate stood at 2.4 fatal police shootings per million of the population per year. Police brutality in the United States Police brutality is a major issue in the United States, but recently saw a spike in online awareness and protests following the murder of George Floyd, an African American who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. Just a few months before, Breonna Taylor was fatally shot in her apartment when Louisville police officers forced entry into her apartment. Despite the repeated fatal police shootings across the country, police accountability has not been adequate according to many Americans. A majority of Black Americans thought that police officers were not held accountable for their misconduct, while less than half of White Americans thought the same. Political opinions Not only are there differences in opinion between ethnicities on police brutality, but there are also major differences between political parties. A majority of Democrats in the United States thought that police officers were not held accountable for their misconduct, while a majority of Republicans that they were held accountable. Despite opposing views on police accountability, both Democrats and Republicans agree that police should be required to be trained in nonviolent alternatives to deadly force.

The killing of Tyre Nichols in January 2023 by Memphis Police Officers has reignited debates about police brutality in the United States. Between 2013 and 2024, over 1,000 people have been killed by police every year. Some of the most infamous examples include the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the shooting of Breonna Taylor earlier that year. Within the provided time period, the most people killed by police in the United States was in 2024, at 1,375 people. Police Violence in the U.S. Police violence is defined as any instance where a police officer’s use of force results in a civilian’s death, regardless of whether it is considered justified by the law. While many people killed by police in the U.S. were shot, other causes of death have included tasers, vehicles, and physical restraints or beatings. In the United States, the rate of police shootings is much higher for Black Americans than it is for any other ethnicity, and recent incidents of police killing unarmed Black men and women in the United States have led to widespread protests against police brutality, particularly towards communities of color. America’s Persistent Police Problem Despite increasing visibility surrounding police violence in recent years, police killings have continued to occur in the United States at a consistently high rate. In comparison to other countries, police in the U.S. have killed people at a rate three times higher than police in Canada and 60 times the rate of police in England. While U.S. police have killed people in almost all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, New Mexico was reported to have the highest rate of people killed by the police in the United States, with 8.03 people per million inhabitants killed by police.

Number, percentage and rate (per 100,000 population) of homicide victims, by racialized identity group (total, by racialized identity group; racialized identity group; South Asian; Chinese; Black; Filipino; Arab; Latin American; Southeast Asian; West Asian; Korean; Japanese; other racialized identity group; multiple racialized identity; racialized identity, but racialized identity group is unknown; rest of the population; unknown racialized identity group), gender (all genders; male; female; gender unknown) and region (Canada; Atlantic region; Quebec; Ontario; Prairies region; British Columbia; territories), 2019 to 2023.

Analysis of ‘US Police Shootings’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/ahsen1330/us-police-shootings on 28 January 2022.

--- Dataset description provided by original source is as follows ---

Context

In the recent killings, a hot topic came into being, "Racism". So, I chose to gather some data to take out some insights and analyze the story around racism in America. I downloaded the raw data from kaggle and prepared it for visualization while correcting values, handling missing content, normalization and categorization

Content

It contains basic data about people like their name, age, gender and race. Along with it, is the shooting/killing information, like date of event, where it happened? how they were shot? did they attack? Were they holding weapons? Did they show any mental illness? Was the policeman wearing a camera/was the incident recorded? Did the suspect flee? Apart from that, a category column holds type of weapon used by the suspect

Acknowledgements

Kagglers

--- Original source retains full ownership of the source dataset ---

This information will not be updated while the Cincinnati Police Department undergoes transfer to a new data management system.

Data Description: This data represents officer involved shooting incidents by the Cincinnati Police Department. An officer involved shooting (OIS) may be defined as the discharge of a firearm, which may include accidental and intentional discharges, by a police officer, whether on or off duty.

Data Creation: This data is created through reporting by the Cincinnati Police Department.

Data Created By: The source of this data is the Cincinnati Police Department.

Refresh Frequency: This information will not be updated while the Cincinnati Police Department undergoes transfer to a new data management system.

CincyInsights: The City of Cincinnati maintains an interactive dashboard portal, CincyInsights in addition to our Open Data in an effort to increase access and usage of city data. This data set has an associated dashboard available here: https://insights.cincinnati-oh.gov/stories/s/c64e-ybfz/

Data Dictionary: A data dictionary providing definitions of columns and attributes is available as an attachment to this dataset.

Processing: The City of Cincinnati is committed to providing the most granular and accurate data possible. In that pursuit the Office of Performance and Data Analytics facilitates standard processing to most raw data prior to publication. Processing includes but is not limited: address verification, geocoding, decoding attributes, and addition of administrative areas (i.e. Census, neighborhoods, police districts, etc.).

Data Usage: For directions on downloading and using open data please visit our How-to Guide: https://data.cincinnati-oh.gov/dataset/Open-Data-How-To-Guide/gdr9-g3ad

Disclaimer: In compliance with privacy laws, all Public Safety datasets are anonymized and appropriately redacted prior to publication on the City of Cincinnati’s Open Data Portal. This means that for all public safety datasets: (1) the last two digits of all addresses have been replaced with “XX,” and in cases where there is a single digit street address, the entire address number is replaced with "X"; and (2) Latitude and Longitude have been randomly skewed to represent values within the same block area (but not the exact location) of the incident.

This set of raw data contains information from Bloomington Police Department cases, specifically it identified cases where officers have fired a gun at a suspect.

**Please note that this particular dataset contains no data. As of current date, the Bloomington Police Department has had no officer involved shootings to report. **

Key code for Race:

• A- Asian/Pacific Island, Non-Hispanic
• B- African American, Non-Hispanic
• I- Indian/Alaskan Native, Non-Hispanic
• K- African American, Hispanic
• L- Caucasian, Hispanic
• N- Indian/Alaskan Native, Hispanic
• P- Asian/Pacific Island, Hispanic
• U- Unknown
• W- Caucasian, Non-Hispanic

Key Code for Reading Districts:

Example: LB519

• ‘L’ for Law call or incident
• ‘B’ stands for Bloomington
• 5 is the district or beat where incident occurred
• All numbers following represents a grid sector.

A map of the five districts can be located on Raidsonline.com, under the tab labeled ‘Agency Layers’.

Disclaimer: The Bloomington Police Department takes great effort in making all sets of data as accurate as possible, but there is no avoiding the introduction of errors in this process. Information contained in this dataset may change over a period of time. The Bloomington Police Department is not responsible for any error or omission from this data or for the use, or interpretation of the results of any research conducted.

Values are: posterior mean (posterior standard deviation) of the regression coefficients. The symbol log referes to the natural logarithm. Pop refers to absolute population size. Pct. B. refers to the percentage of the county population that is black. Md. In. refers to median income. Gini refers to the Gini index of inequality. GRP refers to the Google search racism proxy. W. Ast and B. Ast refer to the white- and black-specific arrest rates for assualt, respectively. W. Wps and B. Wps refer to the white- and black-specific arrest rates for weapons violations, respectively. Posterior probabilty that a postive regression coeffcient is less than zero (or a negative one greater than zero) is coded as: * indicates a probability between 0.10 and 0.05, ** indicates a probability between 0.05 and 0.01, and *** indicates a probability of 0.01 or less.

Following racially charged events, individuals often diverge in perceptions of what happened and how justice should be served. Examining data gathered shortly after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri alongside reactions to a novel officer-involved shooting, we unpack the processes by which racial divisions emerge. Even in a controlled information environment, White Americans preferred information that supported claims of a justified shooting. Conversely, Black Americans preferred information that implied the officer behaved inappropriately. These differences stemmed from two distinct processes: we find some evidence for a form of race-based motivated reasoning and strong evidence for belief updating based on racially distinct priors. Differences in summary judgments were larger when individuals identified strongly with their racial group or when expectations about the typical behaviors of Black Americans and police diverged. The findings elucidate processes whereby individuals in different social groups come to accept differing narratives about contentious events. (2020-09-04)

50,000 americans are pulled over by police everyday. There’re many different interactions with police that have ended tragically, such as the arrest of Sandra bland in Texas in 2015 that ended up with her dying in jail, and the Minnesota stop with falando Castillo where he was shot and killed, those were really egregious incidents.

Our dataset of traffic stops by police officers that was collected by the Stanford Open Policing Project. They've collected data from 31 US states. Currently, a comprehensive, national repository detailing interactions between police and the public doesn’t exist. That’s why the Stanford Open Policing Project is collecting and standardizing data on vehicle and pedestrian stops from law enforcement departments across the country and we’re making that information freely available. The Stanford Open Policing Project, are an interdisciplinary team of researchers and journalists at Stanford University. They are committed to combining the academic rigor of statistical analysis with the explanatory power of data journalism. They’ve already gathered over 200 million records from dozens of state and local police departments across the country.

We'll be focusing on data from the state of Rhode Island. For size reasons, some of the columns and rows have been removed, but you can download the full dataset for any of the 31 states from the project's website

Conclusions.

Black and Hispanic drivers are ticketed searched and arrested at ‎higher rates than white drivers even after controlling for location age gender in here the pattern is widespread occurring throughout the country The black drivers were more likely to be charged with the drug related offenses ‎prior to legalization the policy changed mitigated racial disparity. what's interesting is that the number of searches also dramatically decline in ‎both states in part this is because legalizing recreational marijuana removed a common reason for conducting searches. These differences highlighted asperity in police practices in and of themselves ‎the statistics do indicate racial discrimination. for example that officers searched white drivers of there's a 10% chance or ‎greater that they can contraband but there's black drivers there's a 5% chance or greater this is going to be emitted at discrimination

Challenges.

We have tried to answer some questions and find out some interesting points, such as... Do the genders or race commit different violations? Does gender or race affect who gets a ticket for speeding? Does gender or race affect whose vehicle is searched? Calculating the search rate and Comparing search rates by gender. Comparing speeding outcomes by gender and race. Does gender and race affect who is frisked during a search? Does gender and race affect who is frisked during a search? Examining the search types. Calculating the inventory rate Counting protective frisks. During a vehicle search, the police officer may pat down the driver to check if they have a weapon. This is known as a "protective frisk. Comparing frisk rates by gender. Does time of day affect arrest rate? Calculating the hourly arrest rate. Are drug-related stops on the rise? Comparing drug and search rates. What violations are caught in each district? Tallying violations by district How long might you be stopped for a violation?

Inspiration.

I have used this dataset to develop my skills in data analysis and practice to draw larger conclusions.