- This was a cumulative group project done in DH 101. My group and I wanted to answer the following research questions: How has COVID-19 affected arrest patterns in Los Angeles? How has the Black Lives Matter movement altered arrest patterns in Los Angeles? How does the Los Angeles Police Department police differently based on ethnicity and neighborhood? We used the datasets LAPD Arrest Data, LAPD division Data, LA Zip Code Income, and LA Zip code ethnicities and the digital tools Microsoft Excel, Tableau, OpenRefine, RStudio, and Python to analyze the data. I helped write the content for the website, analyze the visualizations, and create a narrative for the timelines. I conducted extensive literature research on the history of police abuse and oppression of minorities in the United States/Los Angeles, and also helped clean our dataset. based on our analyses, we found that there does seem to be instances of racial discrimination within the LAPD and a correlation between high arrest rates in black neighborhoods. While the forefront events of 2020 have generally lowered instances of arrests, our data illuminates trends that uphold LAPD’s history of disproportionate arrests.
Tools used: Tableau, Open Refine, Microsoft Excel
