In class today, we looked at the ages of people who were killed by the police, using information from the Washington Post. When we checked the ages of everyone, we noticed that the numbers were a bit tilted to the right, meaning that more people were older. We did some math stuff, and it turns out that about 67% of the people who were shot by the police were between 24 and 50 years old.

Then, we did the same thing but just for black and white people. For black individuals, about 78% were between 25 and 44, and for white individuals, it was between 23 and 53.

Next, we wanted to see if there was a difference in the average ages between black and white people shot by the police. And yep, there was! We used something called the Monte Carlo method and figured out that there’s roughly a 7-year difference, and it didn’t happen by chance.

To understand how much this age difference matters overall, we used Cohen’s d method. The number we got was 0.577, and according to the guidelines, that’s a medium-sized difference. So, it seems like the age gap has a noticeable impact on the whole dataset.