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Fatal Police Shootings Fully Interactive

✓ Published1🌍 Public
MMartin Blatz
Last edited Oct 30, 2020
Created on Oct 30, 2020

This interactive map displays fatal police shootings across the United States, with each incident as a colored circle positioned using a geoAlbersUsa projection and d3.geoPath for state boundaries. Users select an attribute from a dropdown to colorize incidents by categories such as race, gender, or threat level, with an ordinal color scale and interactive legend that fades non-hovered points. The data comes from the Washington Post’s Fatal Police Shootings Database, cleaned and parsed via d3.csv in React, while hover states filter points dynamically.

AI-generated description

A program that loads and parses some CSV data from the Fatal Police Shootings Database compiled by the Washington Post

I used the U.S. Geo Map of State Boundaries for the underlying map. In this iteration, I used the geoAlbersUsa projection to clean up and zoom in on the map. While other projection types appear to gracefully handle a lat/long input of 0, it returns null with this projection, which causes a fatal error when you reference the scaled pixel locations.

Adapted from Mass School District Boundaries from the DataVis class.

I've increased opacity compared to previous iterations of my work, and applied a color scale based on an attribute interactively selected by the user. This allows the user to explore any geographic trends in the data based on various attributes of each record. It is my intention to add a histogram to the bottom of the visualization to provide raw count data to provide additional insights.

What you can't see yet is that I've also improved the useData.js file to clean null data from fields I'll be using in future work. Blank data entries are now populated with "unknown" for the gender, race, flee, and armed fields. The age field is populated with a -1 for any blank entries. Finally, I switched the abbreviations for race with full words to be used in the legend.

MIT Licensed

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