My First Python Script: Mapping US Residents Killed by Law Enforcement-

I have been mapping with QGIS (and ARCGIS) for almost 10 years. This project represents my first Python script--a map created by linking Python and QGIS with PYQGIS. For a separate project I have been mapping the number of U.S. residents killed by law enforcement. The data comes from the Mapping Police Violence project, which documents where police have killed residents, linking their name, county, and other information to the original news story where the victim's story was told.

Along with the mapping with Python, I have also generated an R script, pulling data from a repository and running a regression analysis on a total of about 30 demographic, economic and political variables. The strongest, yet most concise model is

Killed ← log(Population) - Employment + Poverty

Killed: Number of residents killed by police per county from 2013-Oct 2017
Population: The total number of people living in the county in 2015, US Census
Employment: Percent of the county employed from 2011-2015, American Community Survey, US Census
Poverty: Percent of the county living in poverty from 2011-2015, American Community Survey, US Census

According to a pseudo-R^2, these three dependent variables explain about 77% of the variation in the data. The model, and all DVs were significant to p<0.0001. Since the IV was a count variable, literally counting the number of victims per county, I used a negative binomial model. The results indicate just a slightly elevated risk of being killed by police in counties with larger populations, a decreased risk when employment is high, and an increased risk when poverty is high.

The data from Mapping Police Violence, while an amazing resource, needed extensive cleaning. I found 60 counties that did not match the states that were identified, or where no counties were listed. I manually found the correct counties through a Google search. (Edit: I have been informed that all of these issues have been corrected on the original Web site)