11 Conclusion and Further Reading

If you’re interested in exploring projects resources that lie at the intersection of GIS, Black history, and the study of structural racism, ESRI’s Racial Equity Hub is a good place to start.

If you’re interested in exploring a specific example of a large-scale interdisciplinary project on systemic racism that incorporates spatial analysis, check out the Mapping Prejudice project from the University of Minnesota (Ehrman-Solberg et al, 2020). The data for that project is available at the University of Minnesota’s institutional repository.

If you’d like to explore publications that use the Open Policing Data, including the initial paper by Pierson et al (2020), see the Stanford Open Policing Project’s publications page. The Stanford project site also has a useful tutorial that introduces the data and provides some guidance in analyzing it. The tutorial includes a discussion of more advanced ways to measure racial bias in traffic stops than the one we used here, and a useful way to extend your knowledge might be to think about how to create and map those more advanced measures.

If you would like to further develop your spatial visualization and mapping skills, an excellent place to start is with the free and open-source book by Lovelace, Nowosad, and Muenchow (2021), entitled Geocomputation with R. The book is more than an introduction to making maps; it’s a comprehensive guide to spatial analysis and Geographic Information Systems using the R programming language.