Module 6 - Visual Differences and Deviation Analysis in R

 For this week's assignment, the class was introduced to the R software environment. We were instructed to create a visualization of a graph. I chose to use Jacksonville, FL Sheriff Department's police shooting data for my data set. I created a data frame using data from 2023. This data contained variables for officer race, gender, tenure, and age. The values for officer gender and race were difficult to graph because there was not much variety (most officers recorded in the data set were white and male, leaving little room to create a dynamic visualization. 

I elected to use the variables Officer Age and Officer Tenure for my visualization. I created a scatter plot and a line graph using ggplot2 (with the help of ChatGPT). Below are the graphs:

What these graphs tells us about police involved shootings within the Jacksonville Sheriff's Department in 2023 is that most of the offending officers are younger than the age of 40 with between 0 and 10 years of tenure behind them. This suggests that these are relatively new officers discharging their weapons at the scene of a disturbance. One interesting data point is that an officer with at least 15 years of tenure shot their weapon in 2023. 

I also created another graph based on the number of suspects shot in 2023 and whether or not the shootings were were fatal. This can be seen below: 

The total number of incidents for 2023 is 35, suggesting an overwhelming trend toward fatalities within the Jacksonville Police Department during police involved shootings. 

These diagrams do not necessarily fit within Few's idea of correlation. The graphs do not tell a story about whether there is a correlation between officer age, tenure, and why the shootings were fatal, but it does point to a problem with officer training and restraint.

To give us a better idea of how officer tenure and suspect fatalities are correlated, I created a bar graph to illustrate the relationship between these two variables. This can be seen below. 

From this graph, we can see that generally speaking, officers with between 3 and 9 years of tenure shot and killed more suspects in 2023.  This graph may be skewed because the original dataset often included multiple officers in the same row for a given shooting incident. Thus, it is possible that fatalities and non-fatalities of a given individual or multiple individuals are being counted more than once. It is not possible, based on the data, to determine which officers shot which individual, rather, the data merely indicates that one or multiple officers were involved in a given shooting. Therefore, this graph is simply an estimate of the number of suspect fatalities incurred by the discharge of weapons by Jacksonville sheriff's officers.