With a clearer outline of where I wanted to take the research, I began the process of visualizing the data that I had so far. I was really interested in working on some more sophisticated analysis elements, so I decided to try a new software and learn Looker Studio. In the beginning learning the software was a bit of a struggle, but over time I began to get a better grasp of the program and simultaneously the magnitude of the discriminatory practices being committed by the police. Accounting for population size, the police put Black men on the London gang identification list at a rate of 25 times that of white men. When the numbers are so staggering, seeing them in literal space really reinforces what they actually mean for real peoples lives.
The visual creating process for the data was quite challenging in just incorporating info from so many different structures and then displaying them as one unified mesh. For example, I really wanted to display borough by borough data, and then show that on an actual map of London. I began by downloading clipped boundaries of the 32 boroughs, and then tried to integrate them with some publicly available code for a Looker Studio extension. The code, however, was a bit outdated and there seemed to be something wrong with the boundary clippings. After some long data checking, I realized that the map boundaries used a UK-specific geographic reference system. Each borough border map used up to 100 coordinate systems to create the outline, and the conversion system between the UK-specific and the generic latitude longitude system was a complex mathematical formula. I ended up writing two short C++ scripts, combining that with a publicly available coordinate batch converter, and reintegrating the output into something that Data Looker could display. In the end, I got some really useful graphs and the knowledge to display more in the future.
With the visualization work done and my time in the UK finally coming to an end, I began to look forward to meeting again with my mentor and beginning the process of writing my final paper.