On September 10th, I was looking at a data set of fatal police shootings and 3 beginning questions came across my mind. The first one being how many of each victim was there, what are the percentages of armed versus unarmed victims and what is the median age of victims in these police shootings. Using Python I was able to analyze the data and answer my questions but also had other questions raised. Firstly, there were 9,935 male victims, 462 female victims and 5 non-binary victims throughout this data set. This tells me that the primary target of police shootings are males but females, although the difference is large, do not fall entirely behind. Next, I asked python the percentage of named versus unarmed victims and I found that 5.42% of victims were unarmed, 57.91% were armed with a gun and 17.03% were armed with a knife. I thought that the drastic difference between unarmed and armed victims seemed inaccurate and these values raised the question if majority of the victims who were supposedly armed were ACTUALLY armed with some sort of weapon or if the police lied order to cover themselves. Lastly, I was curious about the median age of victims and found that the median was around 35 years old, which is still pretty young considering that is when most young professionals tend to really excel and step into their careers which makes this all the more sad.
by Erika Acevedo