Metro Atlanta Civilians Killed by Police Officers (So Far) in 2015

One of the biggest hot topics in the news today is police-involved deaths of civilians. It seems that this issue is bigger in 2015 than it has been in a very long time. Traditionally, data on LEO-involved deaths has been very poorly reported and surprisingly hard to find. Thankfully The Guardian has collected data on this subject using various sources and making it publicly available in a project called “The Counted”.

As of about mid-June, there have been seven LEO-involved deaths in the metro Atlanta area. The following plot shows the locations of those deaths. The data points are color coded by the proportion of the census tract population that is black or African American.

It's difficult to come to any conclusion with only seven data points, but our map seems to indicate that incidences are spread out over the city and occur in diverse neighborhoods. Now let's take a look at the same map, but this time we color code the data points by unemployment rate.

In this case, all but two instances occured in areas with unemployment higher than the national average. Could the economic state of a particular area play a factor in the outcome of police-civilian interactions? It appears so based on the data we have here. To make a real conclusion, however, we should expand our analysis to cover the rest of the country. Stay tuned for more analysis…

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