FATAL: A Study of Fatal Police Interactions in the US

Shared here are public files for the fatal force Community Data Fellowship research project at Morehouse College and Howard University conducted in 2023 and 2024.

This repository contains a few base modifications used by our lab in the analysis of fatal police interactions. Base data files come from the Fatal Force Database and various other sources; here we also share the integration of US Census data using the tidycensus and censusapi packages.

Base files:

• Base files for data processing are stored in the code folder.

• data

  • All raw data is stored or saved in the data folder.

  • Data analysis and results are stored in output and reports folders.

• Python scripts are located in the python folder.

Ancillary files:

• api.R helps new users generate and store a Census API key.

  • You should never share your Census API key. Follow the steps below:

    • Set up an environment variable to hold your api key with usethis::edit_r_environ()

    • Transfer information into .Renviron (pop-up file)

      • Insert CENSUS_API_KEY='your_api_key' into the .Renviron file

    • Insert your census API key via Sys.getenv("CENSUS_API_KEY")

View project resources (forthcoming) at https://github.com/quant-shop/fatalv2

Funding for this project was provided by Data.org in collaboration with The University of Chicago's Data Science Institute as a part of the Institute's Capacity Accelerator Network.

Project PIs

Nathan Alexander (Howard University) & Hye Ryeon Jang (Morehouse College)

Contributors

Myles Ndiritu, Maya Phillips, Jeremiah Lowther, Benjamin Holman