The data used in these visualizations comes from the Washington Post Police Shooting Database. It contains records of over 1,500 people who were shot and killed by police officers in the US in 2015.
First, I decided to examine the distribution of fatal shootings by race. I replaced those records for which no race was recorded, to "NA". I opted for a horizontal bar chart sorted by the counts of shootings to more easily visualize which groups have been victimized the most. Since there are 7 categories in total, it is a manageable amount of bars to see at a time.
The majority of shootings, from this database, have been to white individuals, followed by Black and Hispanic. Data on the uncategorized records is needed to get a full picture. Out of the 114 uncategorized records, it is possible more minorities have been affected than at first glance.
An interesting variable in the databse is "Mental_illness". I choose a donut chart because there are only two categories "Yes" or "No", which makes easy to visualize the proportions, without causing confusion to the human eye.
The data shows that 327 victims of fatal shootings, or 21%, had a mental illness. This is an alarming proportion and can be indicative of a lack of managing mental illness among the police force. More data is needed for other years to see if this proportion is consistent or increasing in size.
For my last chart, I wanted to convey more information in a single visualization over time, so I opted for a scatterplot. The data shows that fatal use of police force was evenly spread throughout the months of 2015. There does not appear to be a time of the year where the problem exacerbates for different age groups, which makes a focalized policy difficult.
The data shows victims of all ages, from the young to the elderly, with an even spread between the ages of 20 and 50.
The use of color/symbols helps to highlight the story that police brutality victims have disproportionely died by shooting. Guns are intended to severely wound or kill, unlike tasers, which are relatively less mortal. This is concerning evidence of excessive use of police force. A comparison between years, instead of months would be helpful to identify whether this pattern is increasing over time.