Deciding to go in a different direction, I tried my hand at looking at what the geographical data could tell me as I had exhausted all my other avenues working on the historical data.
To do this I had to plot the data to look at what we could find, inititally I need a map of the USA to plot this against or plotting the points is not going to make sense.
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import cartopy.crs as ccrs
import cartopy.feature as cfeature
# Specify the full path to your Excel file using a raw string
excel_file_path = r’C:\Users\91766\Desktop\fatal-police-shootings-data.xlsx’
# Read data from Excel file
df = pd.read_excel(excel_file_path)
# Create a map of the USA using Cartopy
fig, ax = plt.subplots(subplot_kw={‘projection’: ccrs.PlateCarree()}, figsize=(12, 9))
ax.set_extent([-125, -66, 24, 49]) # USA bounding box
# Extract latitude and longitude columns
latitude_column = ‘latitude’ # Replace with your actual column name
longitude_column = ‘longitude’ # Replace with your actual column name
latitudes = df[latitude_column].tolist()
longitudes = df[longitude_column].tolist()
# Plotting the coordinates
ax.scatter(longitudes, latitudes, s=10, c=’red’, marker=’o’, alpha=0.7, edgecolor=’k’, transform=ccrs.Geodetic())
# Add map features
ax.coastlines(resolution=’10m’, color=’black’, linewidth=1)
ax.add_feature(cfeature.BORDERS, linestyle=’:’)
ax.add_feature(cfeature.STATES, linestyle=’-‘, edgecolor=’black’) # Draw state lines
# Show the plot
plt.title(‘Coordinates Plot on the Map of the USA’)
plt.show()
This gives a good idea of how the points would look on the map of the USA and I have added state lines to get a better understanding of how the spread is concerning the country.
It’s clear to see from the initial plots that the there’s not a lot shootings in the mid west where not a lot of people live. A lot of shootings seem to be concentrated around more populated areas on the coasts.