Starting work on the Police shooting data, we don’t really have a very easy way through so we initially just look at a few key parameters of our interest and see if we can work our way through them and look for any patterns or insight.
So starting with some descriptive statistics for the analysis, we found that average and median ages of the victims were roughly 37 and 35 respectively.
It also showed a standard deviation of 13 years. Looking at the distribution of the ages we found something like this.
As we can see from this, there seems to be a right skewed distribution for the ages of the victims.
Looking further, what if we could look for any differences in the distributions for the ages of different races of victims.
So trying the same experiment for some of the races separately, we found this.
As you can see for the distribution of ages of Asians, there does not seem to be any visible pattern.
However when looking at data for the distributions of ages for African Americans who were shot, we can see that in terms of the distribution that had all races present, distribution for African American ages is even more right skewed, hence it could be a sign that on an average, younger people of this race are being killed.
Above we also have for comparison the distribution of the ages of all the people who are Hispanic and as we can see the graph for this race does not seem to be as skewed as those for African Americans, hence possibly indicating an average of relatively older Hispanic people being victims as compared to other races.
The distributions for native Americans and those with their races categorized as other do not show any meaningful patterns when visualized.
Looking at the age distributions for white people who were shot,
We can see that this graph is the most similar in spread to the one for Hispanic and African Americans, however it is not as skewed in nature as that for African Americans or Hispanic, in fact it almost looks the least skewed of the 3 thus indicating a central tendency of data points in terms of age.
Just from the descriptive stats of these different sections of age and race, we can tell that on average younger hispanic and black people are being shot as opposed to white people.
Will later be looking into more tools to see how to better quantify this discrepancy in the data when looking at the ages of the victims across different races.
Also most importantly need to take into account for the fact that not all of the variables have data for every row and thus can be somewhat inconsistent.