Examining Philadelphia Shooting Victims Data
I recently came across a dataset from Phila.gov about shooting victims in the city. The dashboard included the option to download the data used to create the two chosen visualizations. So I thought, why not explore this data as well?!
I originally went into this seeing if I could recreate the two visualizations already present (by date and by police district). However, once I dug into the raw data, I spent most of my time cleaning up the dataset and practicing my VLOOKUP skills (thank you Maven Analytics!) for assigning an age group label to each shooting victim.
I did utilize Microsoft SQL Management Server to look through the data and work with the data utilizing my SQL skills. (I assigned the age group labels first in SQL before later realizing I missed a huge group – Minors! For some reason my brain didn’t want to process that little kids were shooting victims, but alas they are. So I redid this step in Excel using VLOOKUP as mentioned above).
Once I thought I had my perfect dataset all ready to go, I uploaded it to Tableau public to start creating visualizations for a dashboard. Right away I noticed that there were big problems when it came to the wound type. ‘Head’, ‘Arm’ and a few other wound types were coming up multiple times because of the way they were entered into the excel sheet or database. So I had to go back to my excel sheet to change all the ‘head’, ‘Head,’ ‘HEAD’ to just ‘Head.’ I was able to do this through find and replace (although Excel does not differentiate between HEAD and head and Head). I repeated this step with each wound type so that they were consistent across each row. I also replaced every blank space under wound type with ‘unknown’ in order to take care of the Nulls. (I had to do this for a few other columns as well with either replacing the missing value with a 0 to indicate a null or with ‘unknown’). Afterwards I was finally able to upload back into Tableau for data visualization!
While this is my first dashboard and only my third data analysis project. It was fun to see what kind of database I was able to come up with just working on the data set for one day. Like always, I’d appreciate any and all feedback!
Philadelphia Shooting Victims Data Visualized
Header Photo by ActionVance on Unsplash