wapoposh

Use R to access Washington Post Police Shootings dataset. Provides convenient functions to spend less time data wrangling and more time generating findings.

Installation

You can install the development version of wapoposh from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("parmsam/wapoposh")

Example

This is a basic example which shows you how to interact with the dataset:

library(wapoposh)
library(dplyr)
# basic example code
tail(policeshootings_v2, 4)
#> # A tibble: 4 × 19
#>      id date       threat_t…¹ flee_…² armed…³ city  county state latit…⁴ longi…⁵
#>   <dbl> <date>     <chr>      <chr>   <chr>   <chr> <chr>  <chr>   <dbl>   <dbl>
#> 1  8706 2022-12-02 shoot      not     gun     Sali… Rowan  NC       35.6   -80.4
#> 2  8697 2022-12-03 shoot      foot    gun     John… Washi… TN       36.4   -82.4
#> 3  8703 2022-12-03 threat     not     knife   Norc… Gwinn… GA       33.9   -84.2
#> 4  8702 2022-12-04 <NA>       <NA>    undete… Tucs… Pima   AZ       32.2  -111. 
#> # … with 9 more variables: location_precision <chr>, name <chr>, age <dbl>,
#> #   gender <chr>, race <chr>, race_source <chr>,
#> #   was_mental_illness_related <lgl>, body_camera <lgl>, agency_ids <chr>, and
#> #   abbreviated variable names ¹​threat_type, ²​flee_status, ³​armed_with,
#> #   ⁴​latitude, ⁵​longitude

glimpse(policeshootings_v2)
#> Rows: 7,999
#> Columns: 19
#> $ id                         <dbl> 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, …
#> $ date                       <date> 2015-01-02, 2015-01-02, 2015-01-03, 2015-0…
#> $ threat_type                <chr> "point", "point", "move", "point", "point",…
#> $ flee_status                <chr> "not", "not", "not", "not", "not", "not", "…
#> $ armed_with                 <chr> "gun", "gun", "unarmed", "replica", "other"…
#> $ city                       <chr> "Shelton", "Aloha", "Wichita", "San Francis…
#> $ county                     <chr> "Mason", "Washington", "Sedgwick", "San Fra…
#> $ state                      <chr> "WA", "OR", "KS", "CA", "CO", "OK", "AZ", "…
#> $ latitude                   <dbl> 47.24683, 45.48742, 37.69477, 37.76291, 40.…
#> $ longitude                  <dbl> -123.12159, -122.89170, -97.28055, -122.422…
#> $ location_precision         <chr> "not_available", "not_available", "not_avai…
#> $ name                       <chr> "Tim Elliot", "Lewis Lee Lembke", "John Pau…
#> $ age                        <dbl> 53, 47, 23, 32, 39, 18, 22, 35, 34, 47, 25,…
#> $ gender                     <chr> "male", "male", "male", "male", "male", "ma…
#> $ race                       <chr> "A", "W", "H", "W", "H", "W", "H", "W", "W"…
#> $ race_source                <chr> "not_available", "not_available", "not_avai…
#> $ was_mental_illness_related <lgl> TRUE, FALSE, FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE, FAL…
#> $ body_camera                <lgl> FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, F…
#> $ agency_ids                 <chr> "73", "70", "238", "196", "473", "101", "19…

You can use latest_data() to get the latest dataset from the Washington Post Github repo.

# get latest data
latest <- latest_data()[[1]]
tail(latest, 4)
#> # A tibble: 4 × 19
#>      id date       threat_t…¹ flee_…² armed…³ city  county state latit…⁴ longi…⁵
#>   <dbl> <date>     <chr>      <chr>   <chr>   <chr> <chr>  <chr>   <dbl>   <dbl>
#> 1  8711 2022-12-05 shoot      foot    gun     Memp… Shelby TN       35.1   -89.9
#> 2  8712 2022-12-05 attack     <NA>    blunt_… Seel… Imper… CA       32.8  -116. 
#> 3  8713 2022-12-06 shoot      <NA>    gun     Wood… Refug… TX       28.2   -97.3
#> 4  8714 2022-12-06 flee       foot    undete… Fres… Fresno CA       36.8  -120. 
#> # … with 9 more variables: location_precision <chr>, name <chr>, age <dbl>,
#> #   gender <chr>, race <chr>, race_source <chr>,
#> #   was_mental_illness_related <lgl>, body_camera <lgl>, agency_ids <chr>, and
#> #   abbreviated variable names ¹​threat_type, ²​flee_status, ³​armed_with,
#> #   ⁴​latitude, ⁵​longitude

Update Frequency

Note that the repo is scheduled to update the package data on a weekly basis. However, it will require a reinstall to pull the latest processed data (.rda) file. As an alternative, the latest_data() function will pull most current public dataset from the Washington Post.

Credit

Credit goes to the Washington Post and their research and reporting/database development team for compiling and sharing the dataset on their Github repo.

Hex icon created using the hexmake app from ColinFay.

Police icons created by surang - Flaticon

Note

The dataset was originally and is still published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. The dataset in the package has been slightly cleaned and provided in an R data file format.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the wapoposh project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.