That was kinda my point. In contrast to the original post which seems to show a correlation I can add other features and show no correlation.

edit:

The hours of training alone don't seem to make a difference to the rate of police fatal shootings.

44 of the 50 states all have a Police Fatal Shooting / Violent Crime index of 2 or less

Hawaii has no basic training but I find it hard to believe that police can be given a gun and head out to the streets with literally ZERO training.

45 of 50 states are in the cluster of 400 < training hours < 800, and Index < 4

The 5 'outliers' warrant a closer inspection in my opinion:

Why do Vermont and North Dakota have the highest indexes of police shootings by violent crime?

Why do Maine and Connecticut have such high training?

Is it really possible that police in Hawaii can go out with no training?

Indeed, for crime rates I was looking for a more general set of data and this is all I found at short notice. What I ideally wanted was an number of 'crimes' per state. But now I'm writing this again I'm not sure exactly what I mean by crime. Should I compare a petty theft to a mass-murder?

When you say cross-national do you mean various countries?

If someone could source that data it could easily be done but I suspect the data isn't readily available on a state level.

Not even in the slighest politically motivated. My motivation was to demonstrate the problems of attempting correlations from a dataset with two features.

>So no correlation whatsoever

This was your response, which I found very confusing as it wasn't clear to me if you were referring to my graphic, or the original graphic in the post https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/yw5xb8/correlation_between_police_training_and_fatal/

Totally agree - number of police would be a great feature

I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you saying no correlation between police training and fatal shootings? If so, then yes, and no.

My post here is in response to a previous post https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/yw5xb8/correlation_between_police_training_and_fatal/ which asserted a correlation between police training and shootings (less training = more shootings). But they hadn't taken into account a great deal of other things.

That post seemed to take only two features and extrapolate. I'm taking more data and more features and showing that the cause and effect cannot be extrapolated from a mere two features.

Here, for example I'm not showing training vs shootings, but training vs shootings by crime rate, which changes the dynamic completely.

In response to the recent post https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/yw5xb8/correlation_between_police_training_and_fatal/ I felt I needed to quickly create this to highlight some issues with the data used and its interpretation.

The original post implies a correlation between police training and fatal police shootings. i.e. they are implying that the less training police receive the more likely they are to be involved in a fatal shooting. Whilst this *may* be true it is not at all proven by this graphic, nor this data.

I found, quite easily, the same stats as the source of this graphic, however if I add some other features like violent crime rate per state (incidents which are more likely to result in violent responses) the resulting graph changes completely. Using this new data I can easily create a feature which is the rate of shootings per million / violent crime per million.

Now you can see that Alaska, for example, isn't unusual. In Alasaka perhaps there are more police fatal shootings because there are more violent crimes per capita, and it has nothing to do with their training?

Thsis graphic was knocked up in 10 minutes in python using pandas and matplotlib using these data sources:

Washington Post shooting database - https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/

US States by population - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population

(Violent) Crime Rate by State - https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/crime-rate-by-state

Police training requirements by state - https://www.trainingreform.org/state-police-training-requirements

Sorry but because it's in a different colour it's really unclear if there is a spike at Halloween or if it's just a marker line for the day