Police Killings DataSet Analysis

Christopher Barajas
Yi-Ting Chang
Christopher Greder
Monica Lagos
Oscar Santana

ADMN 601
Professor Harold Dyck
May 30, 2018

CSUSB
 1 of 7

Introduction

For our final project, our group has chosen a dataset with information about police killings for
the years 2015, 2016, and 2017 in the United States of America. The dataset uses U.S. Census
information and provides us data on median income, poverty rates, high school graduation
rates, and ethnic diversity. The second dataset consists of police killings and provides the
following data points: name, date, manner of death, if the deceased was armed, age, gender,
race, city, state, mental health issues, threat level from the deceased, whether they were
fleeing, and if a body camera was in use. Through analysis, we will test to see if there are
correlations between such factors as age and if that is a predictor as to what age you are mostly
likely to be killed by police in an encounter. We will also test other data points to measure
correlation and deduce if there is causation. While we anticipate there will be correlations,
some that we may already be aware of without the analysis of this dataset, we must also be
cognisant of the fact that correlation does not imply causation.

Analysis

Some of the results are probably obvious without doing the analysis, but we ran some of them
nonetheless. What we found in one case is that when a person is killed by the police, they are
most likely to be shot to death.

It appears that a small percentage were tased and then shot, but that is less likely to occur
when compared to just being shot.

The next correlation we looked at is what weight does age have on being killed by a police
officer. We got the following results:
 2 of 7

Based on the results, we can see the median age of all people killed by police during that time
frame is 34. The average age though is 36. The box plot is a great way to identify the outliers.
Another interesting note from these results is that the majority of people who are killed by
police are in their early 30’s or later. These type of results lead to more questions, but are
outside the scope of this analysis.

Because we looked at age, the next logical data point to look at is gender and race. We got the
following results:

Not surprisingly, of those killed by police officers, they are resoundingly male. In the dataset,
less than 5% of those killed were females. It is easy to let bias and our own ideas of which
gender is associated with violence more, but these results do seem to coincide with males
 3 of 7

being associated with violence more than females. When we look at the results of what factor
“race” has on killings by police officers, we see that the majority of those killed are white. On
the surface, this may seem to against what the majority believes. What we don’t have here is
weights. Although there were more whites who were killed by police, whites comprise over
50% of the population. By sheer numbers alone, one could expect the total number of killings
would have a majority of those who identify as white. What we need to put into context is that
those who identify as black comprise almost 27% of all those killed by police. This is important
because as a population, those who identify as black only make up about 13% of the
population. For comparison, those who identify as hispanic makeup a much larger portion of
the United States population, but only comprise 18% of all those killed by police officers as a
percentage of total killed. There are many other tidbits of information we could pull out of
these results, but we will leave those to the readers and move on to geographic area.

When we aggregated the data view the analysis by geographic area, we found the following
histogram:

California accounted for 16% of all police killings during the time frame of the data collected.
The other outliers are Texas and Florida. These are huge population centers so it would make
sense that these three have the highest number of police killings just based on population.
 4 of 7

Next we look at the next four factors; signs of mental illness, threat level, if they were fleeing,
and if body cameras were in use.

We can glean some interesting information from these results. We see that of all the police
killings, almost 25% of those killed had signs of mental illness. That is 1 out of every 4 people
the police killed could have probably been handled better and would still be alive today.
Perhaps we should invest in mental health services. Possibly even provide training to police
officers on how to identify and handle people with mental health issues. We also see that police
officers reported an attack threat level 63% of the time. What we don’t know is what
constitutes an attack. This factor would need more information to determine the different
types of threats and maybe even consider policies as to which ones require the use of lethal
force. Looking on the flip side, we see that 36% of the time, the threat level was not attack, yet
those people were killed as well. The majority were not fleeing and that would correlate to the
threat level of attack. Again, we should not discount that over 26% of those killed were fleeing.
Lastly, body cameras were not being used in the vast majority of these killings, almost 90% of
the time to be exact. Perhaps if body cameras were used 90% of the time instead of not, the
rest of these results would change dramatically.

Next we look at factors such as median income, poverty levels, high school graduation rates,
and diversity to see if they correlate to states and their rates of police killings. When the data is
aggregated and analyzed we come to the following results:

Surprisingly, we see that when looking at poverty levels, on average, the state of Arizona has a
slightly higher than 25% poverty rate. This puts Arizona as the state with the highest poverty
rate on average. California has a 17% poverty rate and both states have a high school
graduation rate in the 80th percentile. This debunks the idea that poverty rate correlate to
crime which in turn would lead to police killings. Another data point that refutes that is a city in
Alabama named Abanda CDP. This city has a poverty rate of almost 79% and is comprised of
 5 of 7

almost 70% of individuals who identify as white. Again, this bebunks the idea that poverty
correlates to minorities and leads to more police shootings.

State City Income Poverty HS white black native asian hispanic

AL Abanda 11207 78.8 21.2 67.2 30.2 0 0 1.6

This continues to push the idea that correlation does not equate to causation. Police killings
seem to affect every area of our country. It affects all ethnicities, all cultures, and all
socioeconomic platitudes. Some people that fit specific demographic characteristics are at
higher risk, but the simple fact is that police killings are an epidemic affecting us all. We need a
better understanding of why they continue to increase and why no one really knows that they
are occuring. People are more inclined to protect police officers who are killed at a fraction of
the rate that they kill those that they are sworn to protect. In no way does this data take sides,
but rather point to the fact that we need to understand the practices that lead to this many
deaths and what we can do as a society to change them.

Conclusion

Police killings are a hot topic of any conversation. Nonetheless, it is a topic we should discuss
openly and understand the statistics behind the data. What is happening, where is it
happening, and to who is it happening. While it is obvious that certain ethnic groups comprise a
larger portion of those killed when their overall population percentage is accounted for, it does
not take away from the fact that overall, there is a large amount of people in general who are
killed by police. Based solely on the data, we also have no way to refute that the police officer
in each case did not fear for their life or feel threatened enough to justify the use of deadly
force, at least in their mind.

What we can take away from this analysis is that there are opportunities where we can drill
down deeper and ask more questions. Such as, what is a threat and which ones authorize the
use of deadly force? For those that were fleeing, why were they shot? Mental health seems to
be an important factor in police confrontations that ended in a person being shot and killed,
and sometimes tased too. From this we can deduce that perhaps we should invest in mental
health wellness programs and training for police officers on how to identify and manage
situations where mental health is a factor. These are just some of the suggestions of items to
look at. The goal of identifying these opportunities would be to reduce the number of police
killings while at the same time, ensuring police officers have the tools and training they need to
do their job according to the laws imposed by those very people they serve. Whatever our bias
is, one thing to get from all of this data is that there are far too many people being killed by
police officers, the question that remains is why.
 6 of 7

References

Institute, SAS, et al. Fundamentals of Predictive Analytics with JMP, Second Edition.
SAS Institute, 2016.

Wullum, Karolina. “Fatal Police Shootings in the US | Kaggle.” Countries of the World |
Kaggle, Kaggle, 22 Sept. 2017, www.kaggle.com/kwullum/fatal-police-shootings
-in-the-us.