I’ve been interested in this project for a while. It’s based on the Puppycide Database Project, which claims to be the first nationwide database tracking police shootings of animals. Many of us on the left know that this is an ongoing issue. How big of an issue? Well, I suppose that’s what I’m trying to figure out by analyzing the data, but at first glance it might be big enough to get liberals and conservatives to question the institution of policing in this country. Ok, I don’t think they’ll ever do that, but there’s something to say about people caring more about animals than their fellow humans. Regardless, the animals in this database are victims too and I want to proceed with the respect they deserve, and to do them justice by revealing this overlooked side of police violence. My intent is to thoroughly clean, analyze and visualize this database, and at some point put those visualizations into a public dashboard application. Unfortunately, the project was already a large undertaking and its original administrators seem to have been unable to continue devoting their time to it. The project was founded in 2014 and stopped accepting submissions of victim reports in 2016. I wanna pick it up where it was left off and will gladly accept help. I won’t put R chunks here ‘cause it might end up being a lot, but just visualizations as I go along.
Victim Number by Year from 2000 to 2016
