Week 9/7-9/12
This week I began to analyze the Washington Post data on fatal police shootings, we began to find things within the data that peaked our interest. For me this was the fatal police shootings marked as accidental. I noticed that most of these accidental killings were mostly black or Hispanic people. Going forward I will begin to research these events. I will begin by building graphs that prove my observation. I also want to look deeper into the individual cases to understand the circumstances behind them, because the numbers only tell part of the story. This might help show whether these deaths were truly accidents or if there are bigger patterns of bias and systemic issues involved.
Week 9/13-9/19
This week I chose JASP to use for my project. I had trouble in Excel trying to only keep the rows with “accidental” and “undetermined” threat types. I am still working on fixing this so I can move the data into JASP.
Week 9/22-9/26
This week I began to mess around with JASP seeing it as imperative to someone who deals with statistics often. To get the basics down I watched this video Introduction to JASP as well as reading these slides by professor Davis Software application notes for MTH 231. I also learned how to filter data points through excel, not the most efficient way but it gets the job done. With a little help I filtered out the threat types, “accident” and “undetermined” as well as the ages, and races.
Week 9/29-10/3
This week I decided another important factor for accidental and undetermined shootings is if the bodycam was on. I played around with JASP for a little bit, and it is very useful but i found it very constricting, good for simple graphs and data reading, but not for complex data. I will continue to use JASP but begin to learn R to go in depth more on the data.