Racial Disparity in Marijuana Arrests

Context of Project: I worked on this project in Fall 2019 during my time at the American Civil Liberties Union as a data science intern. The project was released to the public on April 20th, 2020.

Project Synopsis: This is a massive research report which outlines marijuana-related arrests (due to possession and sale) in the USA from 2010 to 2018. The report provides analysis and visualizations on the racial disparities in these arrests. The report takes a national-level look at trends and analysis but also breaks down statistics by state, which is especially important given legalization and decriminalization in recent years.

My Role:

• Wrote Python (Pandas) scripts to make calls to the FBI Crime Data API, wrangle and aggregate 2017-2018 marijuana arrest/possession data
• Wrote R scripts(tidyverse-dplyr, janitor,) to clean and standardize the 2017-2018 marijuana arrest/possession data
• Wrote R scripts (ggplot2) to create initial visualizations (not included in the report) of trends in the 2017-2018 data

Technologies Used: R (tidyverse-dplyr, janitor, ggplot2), Python (pandas), FBI Crime Data API