/mappingpoliceviolence

Repo for Data Science Project on US Police Violence

Primary LanguageJupyter NotebookMIT LicenseMIT

Mapping Police Violence in the US

The aim of this data science project is to delve into exploratory data analysis of the comprehensive dataset (publicly available at https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/) on the death of US citizens as a consequence of police brutality. The dataset is rich in information, with 60+ features to work with. Key features of the dataset include:

  • Incident Date: The date when the incident occurred.
  • Victim Name: The name of the person involved in the incident.
  • Age: The age of the victim.
  • Gender: The gender of the victim.
  • Race: The race of the victim.
  • Location: The geographical location of the incident.
  • Cause of Death: The manner in which the death occurred.
  • Details: Additional context or description of the incident.
  • Source: The source of the information.

Link to the dataset: https://airtable.com/appzVzSeINK1S3EVR/shroOenW19l1m3w0H/tblxearKzw8W7ViN8

In this project, we investigate the following:

  • Class imbalances or any marginalization/under-representation of ethnic minorities that are a part of the US Population (e.g., Hispanics, Blacks, etc.) with the help of OVR Logistic Regression and SMOTE.
  • Using the temporal trends in police-related violence incidents to predict the number of deaths using Time Series Analysis (WMA)
  • Suggest a solution to prevent such incidents in the future by using the data to incorporate situational training for police using a Random Forest Classifier. A better way to understand this solution is this: we can leverage the solution to predict the cause of death of a potential victim in a test situation based on the available data, and the police can then be trained to avoid that outcome in that particular situation.

For a comprehensive report on our findings, please refer to the provided Jupyter Notebooks or read our article here: https://medium.com/@abdulhaseeb494/3f8754e5045b.

Contributors: AbdulHaseeb Khan, Aazen Saleem, Ahmad Xoraiz Waheed, Ammar Hussain Uppal

For any queries regarding this project, feel free to email me at 25100325@lums.edu.pk