This is the first post in a series of data sets. You may find this data set in the `usdata` R package (automatically loaded with the `openintro` R package) or on this page.
"Hands up, don't shoot" was the slogan of protesters after the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The event was the trigger for Washington Post reporters to research national records of police shootings. After learning that the FBI's records were incomplete as reporting was voluntary, reporters created their own database using newspaper and media reports. The dataset has records from 2015 to present.
About 1,000 people are fatally shot by police each year. From the database, one can view the characteristics of this population. They are overwhelmingly male: 95.6%. They are young: 63.2% are aged 15 to 40. Race is identified as White 45.5%, Black 23.8%, and Hispanic 16.6%, Asian 1.6% with the remainder unknown or other. The 2019 U.S. Census estimates that 13.4% of the population is Black so Black people are over-represented in the data.
This dataset interested me after reading about various police shootings in the news. Certainly police must protect themselves and others but some of the shootings were unnecessary or mistakes. When a person is shot in the back or holding a cellphone, it is a tragedy. I hope that the Washington Post dataset will cause such fatal police shootings to be less frequent by shining a light on it.
