Visualizing WaPo’s police shooting dataset
Note: The data is sourced from the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shooting since 2015. It includes each instance of a civilian shot to death by an on-duty police officer from January 1, 2015, to the present day. As of August 2020, over 5,000 people had been shot and killed by police.
I’ve been interested in the question of race in America since I read Beloved in college, and realized that 13 years of public primary education had never once made me really consider the trauma and moral degradation of American chattel slavery. I knew it was bad, of course, but I had been spared the details and was able to ignore the worst of it. (That’s how most lessons about race go when you’re White in a school district that’s over 90% White.) But Toni Morrison spares no details, and allows no apathy. Since my Beloved revelation in 2014, I’ve thought/ read/ listened/ talked a lot more about the history and legacy of Black and White people in the United States.
This data viz project is part of that process, and follows my interest in telling real, data-driven stories in accessible, artful ways. The result, here, comprises two new ways to visualize the Washington Posts’s dataset of fatal police shootings in America. I explored different ways to show the disparities present in the data, and found that they were best expressed by a map that shows the widespread geographical nature of police shootings, and a scatterplot that communicates the over- and underrepresentation of victims by race.
If you read nothing else, here are the most important takeaways:
Key Takeaways
1. This is a widespread problem. Police shootings happen in every state, in urban and rural areas. They happen almost every day. Thousands of people in the U.S. have been killed in a professional, pre-judicial capacity by the people who are supposed to protect and serve our country.
2. This is a problem that clearly and undeniably intersects with race. Black people are more likely to be shot by police than White people are. Black people are more likely to be shot by police than anybody is. White people are underrepresented as victims of police shootings in every state except one.
Part I: Maps
When I saw that each row of data was a shooting that included geographical location, my first question was what the map would look like. The dataset gives a city and state pair for each shooting, and after a couple iterations with state level data, I used a geocoding script to aggregate the shootings by city. A spike map was suggested during an early round of feedback, and the result is striking.
The spike map combines a bar chart and a map. Like a density map, it communicates concentrations of numbers on a map, and allows us here to see that there have been around 80 shootings in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Houston, between 20–60 in a couple dozen other U.S. cities, and 1–20 shootings in more places than can be counted from the map. Click to view the responsive spike map with city labels, exact numbers, and the option to filter by race.
As with most maps that show person-involved statistics, the raw numbers track with population density. Cities are denser centers of police shootings than areas with lower population density in large part because there are more people there.
Adding a filter for the race of shooting victims shows additional patterns — some population dependent and some not. Shootings of Black people are much more prevalent in the Eastern half of the country, which makes sense since the majority of Black people in America live in ten states in the South and East. Black Americans also live more in urban areas than in rural areas, which offers some explanation for the city spikes and sparseness of rural police shootings of Black people in most states.
Many of the cities that show up with noticeable spikes on this map have sizable populations of both Black and White people — St. Louis (49% Black, 44% White), Chicago (30% Black, 49% White), Houston (25% Black, 49% White), New York (25% Black, 33% White), Columbus (29% Black, 54% White), Atlanta (54% Black, 38% White), Philadelphia (42% Black, 41% White).
These White populations are not apparent on the map of White police shooting victims, though. Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York have no apparent presence on this map. Columbus, Houston, Atlanta, and St. Louis can be picked out, but they are not particularly significant points.
Instead, there are many more White people shot outside of large cities, and the Southwest and West show most of the few taller spikes. (In Las Vegas, although shooting counts by race are generally more in line with population demographics, signs of mental illness in victims were reported in nearly half of the city’s fatal police shootings, and are a significant factor to consider.)
Absolute numbers do not tell the whole truth of this story. It’s true that more non-Hispanic White people are killed by police than people of any other race or ethnicity. It’s also true that non-Hispanic White people make up almost a supermajority (two-thirds) of the United States population. If White people make up 65% of the people in a state, a “fair” distribution of police violence would mean they would also make up about 65% of its police shooting victims. Ideally, nobody would be a victim of lethal police violence. But since thousands of Americans are, it’s worth asking whether some groups get more of the violence and some groups get less.
Spoiler alert: there is not “equitable distribution” of police violence.
Part II: Scatterplots
A scatterplot allows for quick comparison of state demographic counts vs. police shooting demographic counts. When the counts are equal — when police violence is distributed through the population proportionately with race— a point will appear along the line y=x.
That almost never happens. In all states but two (New Mexico and Mississippi), the percentage of Black people killed by police in a state is higher than the percentage Black people who live in that state. Some times it’s much higher: the farther a point is away from the central line y=x, the greater the difference is between shooting demographics and state population demographics.
The opposite is true for White people — in all states except New Hampshire, White people are underrepresented as victims of police shootings. Click here to explore the chart on your own.
Let’s take Pennsylvania for an example. With 49 White people and 42 Black people shot and killed by police, the absolute numbers are pretty close. White victims and Black victims each count for about 40% of the 111 police shootings in Pennsylvania.
What these near-equal numbers bely is a major disparity when compared to population counts. According to the 2018 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census, Black people make up 10.6% of Pennsylvania’s population. White people make up 76.8% of the population. Black people are significantly overrepresented as victims of police shootings, and White people are significantly underrepresented as victims of police shootings. By plotting states along axes that compare the makeup of the general population and the makeup of the police shooting victims, we can visualize this over- and underrepresentation.
The over- and underrepresentation trends for Black and White victims are true in almost every single state. Black people are shot by police at rates higher than demographic counts would dictate, and White people are shot by police at rates lower than demographic counts would dictate.
Given that modern police departments are, in some parts of the country, direct descendants of slave patrols, the starkly different trends in police shootings of Black people and White people are a clear product of U.S. history. Consider, too, the effects of implicit racial bias that mean officers are more likely to shoot at Black people than at White people, or racist policing policies that de facto codify Blackness as reason for suspicion, or outdated notions of Black-on-Black crime that have allowed for decades of public disbelief that policing as we know it could be a problem rather than a solution (often coming from White people who live largely police-free lives).
The trends for Black and non-hispanic White people are the most obvious. They are an example of what White privilege looks like. Black lives are taken by police at a disproportionate rate, and White people are the (often unwitting) beneficiaries of this imbalance.
Considering the other races reported in this data set shows more patterns. (Click here to explore the chart yourself.) Native Americans make up a much lower percentage of the U.S. population, and a smaller portion of this dataset. However, like Black people, they are largely over-represented in the 22 states where police shootings of Native American people have occurred — only in New Mexico and Oklahoma are the percentages of Native American population higher than the percentages of Native Americans shot by police.
Hispanic people make up the closest to an “equitable share” of police killings in this dataset — they are over-represented in slightly over half the states and under-represented in the others, in pretty equal absolute numbers. They make up the largest single demographic group of police shooting victims in any state, however, with 318 Hispanic people killed in California, largely in Los Angeles.
Method
Each data point in the original dataset corresponds to the shooting of one individual, and includes the city and state where the shooting occurred. For the spike map, I geocoded each [city, state] pair to a [latitude, longitude] pair using Google Scripts, and aggregated to city- and state-level counts using D3.
The spike map was suggested during an early feedback session. I pulled from Mike Bostock’s county population map to implement it.
I compiled my demographic dataset from U.S. Census data, aggregating available race and ethnicity data so that my set matched the demographic categories reported in the Washington Post dataset.
A note on capitalizing Black and White: I capitalize Black for largely the same reasons discussed in this New York Times article. I capitalize White because it reminds us that White is a race too, not a default setting. Richard Dyer’s 2005 essay “The Matter of Whiteness” is a great resource on the idea that White people have the privilege to be non-raced.
