This is an active work in progress: Kaggle Notebook
The intersection of science, politics, personal opinion, and social policy can be rather complex. This junction of ideas and disciplines is often rife with controversies, strongly held viewpoints, and agendas that are often more based on belief than on empirical evidence. Data science is particularly important in this area since it provides a methodology for examining the world in a pragmatic fact-first manner, and is capable of providing insight into some of the most important issues that we face today.
High-profile police shootings killings of unarmed black men have triggered a divisive national dialog on the issue of racial bias in policing. These events, compounded with years of racial injustice have spurred the growth of large social movements seeking to raise awareness of what is viewed as the systemic targeting of people-of-color by police forces across the country. On the other side of the spectrum, many hold a view that an unbalanced targeting of non-white citizens is a myth created by the media based on a handful of extreme cases, and that these highly-publicized stories are not representative of the national norm.
An analysis of arrest data voluntarily reported to the FBI by thousands of city and county police departments around the country reveals that, in 800 jurisdictions, black people were arrested at a rate five times higher than white people in 2018, after accounting for the demographics of the cities and counties those police departments serve.
In 250 jurisdictions, black people were 10 times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts.
The analysis, conducted by ABC News in collaboration with ABC-owned stations, covers a three-year period ending in 2018, from which the most recent data is available.
While lots of national analysis has been done on this topic, it's 2020 and I wanted to look at it from a local perspective using standardized data anyone could submit an open records request for. I will be updating this file as the project progresses but the majority of the work and updates can be followed on Kaggle. @motherofdata
Thanks for Patrick Triest for the inspiration, jump start, & tutorial.
<3 xoxojehnnyoh 2020