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dr5c OP t1_is6qf2g wrote

A commenter mentioned that the ratios should have the same scale. While I have seen graphs that use different ratios and feel "10 Police Killings per 10 Million" is conceptually simpler than ".1 Police Killings per 100,000", here is an alternative graph with per Capita set on both axis to 100,000. https://imgur.com/a/NN3JUGu

Thank you for the feedback.

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[deleted] t1_is6zumc wrote

This is WAY better. Now we can see that police killings are small compared to homicides, and we're free to compare countries by their ratios (slope to the point) and magnitudes (distance from the origin.) This graph invites us to visually study it.

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scottevil110 t1_is9o0q5 wrote

Better but mislabeled. Per capita means per person (per head) so by definition they need to be on the same scale if that's the terminology you're using.

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GenXHax0r t1_is732y0 wrote

Seems to me, basically a line from 0,0 to top, right is the "justified" line -- seems reasonable that the more killings in general, greater numbers of police killings are justified. Bottom,right then is the "more police killings than justified" position.

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[deleted] t1_is7437y wrote

This is exactly my point about fixing the axes. Now, I too wonder if there's some as of yet unidentified law that relates the two numbers. Is it linear, or exponentially increasing? Not being distracted by the suggestion that police kill more people, and having to look for that reason, unleashes all these new questions.

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JosephusMillerTime t1_is8xh1v wrote

This sounds like a Police shooting apologist trying to be diplomatic in an overly gunned up, extremely inequitable and racist country.

I'm not saying you are, but if I was looking to explain away something that is not at all good, this is how I'd do it.

This graph doesn't show that police don't kill more people, for that we'd need the x axis per capita of police not general population.

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TheMan5991 t1_is6uznw wrote

Thank you for the updated graph. This is a lot easier to read.

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Illeazar t1_is7avzw wrote

What is this, a post on r/dataisbeautiful where the OP recognizes they messed up and attempts to correct it? This is amazing!

I applaud your willingness to improve, but I do have to say that even your updated graph still gives the impression at first glance that every single cou try has more police killings than homicides, though the updated version it only takes a few seconds of study to correct that vs a whole minute of searching to discover the axes had different units. A truly beautiful graph of this data would show at a glance that while police killings were much lower than homicides in all countries, some countries have a worse ratio than others. Something like a bar graph of police killings per homicde (or per 10 homicdes or whatever) would do this much better than a scatter plot, because in the scatter plot there's no really good way to scale the axes to give the correct visual representation of this particular dataset at first glance.

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fishling t1_is7tbot wrote

Why wouldn't you choose "per 1 million" though, for both?

It is more natural to think of whole numbers for something like killings, and the idea of "parts/things per million" is more common than your original "per 10M" scale.

Also, why are you calling it "per capita" when it is is "per 100k"? Per capita means for a single individual. That's like calling it percent (per 100k); it's not a per "cent" if it's not out of 100.

Also, why aren't your flags the same size, why are the dots so large, why are the flags even there, why isn't the arrow behind the box, why couldn't you figure out a way to label each country (I've seen busy charts do this, so it's possible).

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