Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

terrykrohe OP t1_jde6diq wrote

Purpose

Police killings and suicides, it seems, are different spheres of activity and would/should have NO connection/correlation (excepting suicide-by-cop).Butthe data says there IS correlation.

That is, why would a state with a high suicide rate also have a high police killing rate?
conversely, why would a state with a low suicide rate also have a low police killing rate?

How? Why?

0

headhouse t1_jde97ax wrote

Have you tried mapping all the other causes of death?

Also, you're comparing two disparate stretches of time leading up to the same endpoint. That seems like bad practice.

I'm also not seeing where the wapo link you provided gives data on the party affiliation of the people who were shot. Is that data just a reflection of the location, then?

I'm not a data scientist, but this feels very pegboards-and-strings-across-the-room kind of scenario.

5

terrykrohe OP t1_jdi13yi wrote

... the WaPost data indicates the state of each death; the total of deaths for each state was calculated. If that state was Indiana, it is a red plot point; if Vermont, it is a blue plot point, etc

1

Snagle2354 t1_jdebltb wrote

Apples to oranges. The WaPo dataset is behind a paywall so I cannot verify, but you used the term ‘police killings,’ whereas WaPo uses the term ‘police shootings.’ From previous interaction with the dataset I believe the WaPo source excludes non-firearm ‘police killings.’

You said yourself, suicide correlates with firearm ownership; I propose ‘police shootings’ likely correlates with the presence of firearms in police encounters which likely correlates to availability of firearms.

Furthermore, as somebody else mentioned, the time domain differs between the sets. You have different time periods, different classification criteria, potentially overlapping datapoints treated as distinct events. I do not believe any valid conclusions or observations could really be made from this presentation.

1