Fatal Encounters

The goal of this post is to explore the Fatal Encounters dataset. First, we defined a set of questions. Then we created graphs to answer these questions and finally, we commented on these graphs.

Fatal Encounters documents non-police deaths that occur when police are present or are precipitated by police action or presence. It documents all available records for all 50 states of USA, back to 2000.

The general ouline of this post is as follows :

Part 1 : Exploration#

1. Visualization based on race#

  • Question 1 : What is the repartition of deaths ?

repartition_by_race

  • Question 2 : What is the evolution of deaths ?

evolution_by_race

  • Question 3 : What is the most common cause of death ?

comparaison_men_women


With the evolution graph produced, we can see the evolution per race but we can conclude that the deaths have highly increased around the years 2014 and 2015 but have been decreasing since 2018 in general. The last graph shows that more people are killed by gunshot.

2. Visualization based on states #

  • Question 4: Which state has the most deaths ?

deaths_by_states


We can see in the graph above that California and Texas are the states where most deaths occured. This is not surprising because they have the largest populations respectively. It is the same thing for Florida and other states as well so according the dataset, we can say that there is a correlation between the population and the number of deaths. Let's verify this hypothesis with the next graph.
  • Question 5 : Is there a correlation between the population and the number of deaths ?

correlation_population_deaths


The graph shows that there is a strong correlation between the population and the number of deaths. This confirms our hypothesis.

3. Other visualizations#

  • Question 6 : What is the distribution of ages ?

distribution_ages


This graph shows that the people who die more are in the 20 to 50 year old range.

Part 2 : Summary#


In sum, we explored the fatal encounters dataset by creating graphs to answer some questions we had defined. We found that there are more white people recorded and this is surely due to the fact that there are more white people than other races. We also found that there is a correlation between the population and the number of deaths and that people generally die by gunshot. The trend in deaths has been down since 2018.