catapulted the world into a state of consternation.
George Floyd, a 46 year old African-American male’s life was nullified— a knee was taken to his neck by a police officer. This sparked global outrage which led to protests around the world in the spirit of the Black Lives Matter Movement, and riots across American cities. American police officers’ actions were thrust into the global spotlight and highlighted — people of color’s disproportionate deaths (to their percentage in the population) by the those sworn to serve and protect. As I heard the names and tragic stories of Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Samuel DuBose, Laquan McDonald, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Stephon Clark,………………… I recalled the deaths of others by the hands of the police -Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell- from my home city of New York.
As a New Yorker I am relatively familiar with the politics of the city. In the past two decades with the various initiatives of mayors in conjunction with the NYPD there has been a touting of the reduction of crime in NYC. There has also been publicized incidents of police officers use of excessive force. I decided to take a look at New York City citizens’ complaints against the New York City Police Department and how it may or may not correlate to the rate of crime in New York City. My data was collected from the years 2002 to 2017, a fifteen year span. I investigated the data under the pretext —
Crime has decreased in NYC while Citizen Complaints against the NYPD has risen.
I selected the Index Crimes by County and Agency: Beginning 1990 dataset from State of New York. “The Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) collects crime reports from more than 500 New York State police and sheriffs’ departments. DCJS compiles these reports as New York’s official crime statistics and submits them to the FBI under the National Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. UCR uses standard offense definitions to count crime in localities across America regardless of variations in crime laws from state to state. In New York State, law enforcement agencies use the UCR system to report their monthly crime totals to DCJS. The UCR reporting system collects information on seven crimes classified as Index offenses which are most commonly used to gauge overall crime volume. These include the violent crimes of murder/non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault; and the property crimes of burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft. Police agencies may experience reporting problems that preclude accurate or complete reporting. The counts represent only crimes reported to the police but not total crimes that occurred.”
#blacklivesmatter #nyc #data-science #data analysis
