The visualization is imo ineffective because I'm not sure there is anything too surprising that's related on the horizontal (time) axis, which is given prominence. If the racial disparity in this metric is what is of interest to people (which it almost certainly is), then as it does not vary significantly by time -- or at least, a variation that's somehow important to point out is not made obvious -- any more effective representation would not show time on an axis.

(The staggering of the Native American line is almost certainly an artifact of a small N, particularly compared to the other race segments. The confirmation would be to see whether or how those dramatic rises and falls track any other statistics in that population or areas.)

The WaPo dataset is used in a ton of criminology and other social science research papers devising metrics to shed some light on police shooting as a phenomenon. If you're interested in doing more visualizations on this topic, poke around Google Scholar and see what they've come up with in terms of interesting statistics.

(As this is a data visualization sub, I'm commenting on the visualization and providing feedback. The criminology research on this is vast and complex -- pointing out that one metric doesn't illuminate the problem or represent everything is not particularly useful.)