In this project completed over an entire quarter in Computer Science 32 (Object Oriented Programming) at the University of California, Santa Barbara with Professor Zoe Wood, we aggregate demographic data from the United States and analyze it in conjunction with police shooting data.
This lab project was really insightful, not just in learning how to manage and build a large scale programming project, but in examining data that has legitimate implications to our daily lives living here in the United States. After working with the data, I noticed the significant difference when comparing racial demographic data of counties/states to police shooting data. We hear a lot about how certain races are "disproportionally" affected by police brutality and shootings, but with this data it is so clearly displayed: certain races (like African Americans) have such a small fraction of the population demographically (0.10) and yet their proportion of police shootings is even higher than their demographic proportion (0.17). For the state level, the difference between the African American proportion of demographic population and proportion affected by police shootings is almost double (a startling statistic!).
As programmers, it is so important to be cognizant of these systemic disadvantages that certain minority groups have and represent them as accurately as possible. For future iterations of this project, I would be interested in overlapping more than two categories (perhaps we could find out things about even more specific groups like under 18 Black males + police shootings or over 65 Asian Americans for example).