Data Normalization & Classification: Highlighting Racial Disparities in Police Violence

Workshop created for the UBC Library Search Commons by: June Skeeter (They/Them/Theirs) skeeter1@mail.ubc.ca

Land Acknowledgement

I am speaking to you today from the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ təməxʷ (Tsleil-Waututh), Skwxwú7mesh-ulh Temíx̱w (Squamish) Nations. This data map was pulled from native-land.ca. This is by no means a definitive source, but it’s a good place to start building an understanding of the Indigenous territories, languages, and treaties in your area.

Content Warning

This workshop deals with a difficult and painful subject that may be triggering to some, especially BIPOC individuals. We are going to use a dataset of police involved deaths in Canada from 2000-2017. The data was obtained from Pivot Legal Society and initially collected by the CBC. The intent behind choosing this dataset end goal of this workshop is to show that programming and data analysis can be powerful tools for promoting social and environmental justice issues.

Why Police-Involved Deaths in Canada?

Canadian policing institutions rely on secrecy and the a of statistics to perpetuate the narrative that police violence and systemic racism are “just American issues” and that Canada is “better”. But it is patently untrue, police violence and systemic racism are serious issues in Canadian society and they need to be part of the public discourse in order to dismantle these systems of oppression and hold Canadian institutions accountable.

Learning Outcomes

1) Investigate how data normalization impacts the way we perceive patterns in a dataset.

2) Look at different data classification methods and how they impact the patterns we perceive in a dataset.

3) See an example of how Open Source GIS can be applied to social justice issues.

Definitions

Data normalization: The process of scaling one variable by another. Normalization allows us to highlight patterns in one variable that may be masked that variables correlation with another.

Data Classification Methods of grouping data into smaller numbers of classes so they are easier to interpret. The choice of classification method can have a drastic impact on how we perceive a data set and should be carefully considered.

Open Source GIS GIS tools and software that are freely available online. Open source technology is more accessible than proprietary tools like ArcPro, making them useful tools for individuals and organizations that lack the resources of large institutions like UBC.

Poll Questions:

1) Which country do you think has a higher frequency of police involved deaths?

A) Canada
B) The United States
C) They're about equal

2) Which country do you think has a greater racial disparity in incidents of police involved deaths?

A) Canada
B) The United States
C) They're about equal