Open data is becoming more and more popular in cities across the US. Many cities have portals which provide citizens access to data about various aspects of their community. Information about education, transportation, zoning, recreation, and crime is made available. By providing this information, the city is able promote honesty and transparency in the local government. Indianapolis, the capital city of Indiana, has an open data portal found here.
For this post, I used the IMPD Officer Involved Shooting dataset. This dataset contains information on Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department (IMPD) officer involved shootings in Indianapolis and Marion County from January 2014 to March 2017.
The goals of this post is to illustrate how to clean up a dataset and visualize the results. From this analysis, I hope to answer two questions: Where are the shootings occurring in Indianapolis, and are the number of officer involved shootings increasing?