ggplot geom_col: making certain axis count integers rather than summing - r

Question

I am currently making a hate crime case study. For my plot I am using one zip-code as my y-axis and plotting how many crimes and what group is being targeted on the x-axis using geom-col. The problem is my y-axis is adding the zip-codes together rather than counting each frequency of how many times the zip-code shows up. Here is my dataset looks like:
structure(list(ID = 1:5, CRIME_TYPE = c("VANDALISM", "ASSAULT", "VANDALISM", "ASSAULT",
"OTHER"), BIAS_MOTIVATION_GROUP = c("ANTI-BLACK ",
"ANTI-BLACK ", "ANTI-FEMALE HOMOSEXUAL (LESBIAN) ",
"ANTI-MENTAL DISABILITY ", "ANTI-JEWISH "),
ZIP_CODE = c(40291L, 40219L, 40243L, 40212L, 40222L
)), row.names = c(NA, 5L), class = "data.frame")
Here is my code:
library(ggplot2)
df <- read.csv(file = "LMPD_OP_BIAS.csv", header = T)
library(tidyverse)
hate_crime <- df %>%
filter(ZIP_CODE == "40245")
hate_crime_plot <- hate_crime %>%
ggplot(., aes(x = BIAS_MOTIVATION_GROUP, y = ZIP_CODE, fill =
BIAS_MOTIVATION_GROUP)) +
geom_col() + labs(x = "BIAS_MOTIVATION_GROUP", fill = "BIAS_MOTIVATION_GROUP") +
theme_minimal() +
theme(axis.text.x=element_text (angle =45, hjust =1))
print(hate_crime_plot)
hate_crime_ploter <- hate_crime %>%
ggplot(., aes(x = UOR_DESC, y = ZIP_CODE, fill =
UOR_DESC)) +
geom_col() + labs(x = "UOR_DESC", fill = "UOR_DESC") +
theme_minimal() +
theme(axis.text.x=element_text (angle =45, hjust =1))
print(hate_crime_ploter)
For full data visit here: visit site to download data set

Answer 1

Alright, I think you've got a couple issues here. What's happening in your code is you're asking ggplot to make a bar plot with a categorical variable (BIAS_MOTIVATION_GROUP and UOR_DESC) on the x-axis and a continuous variable (ZIP_CODE) on the y-axis. Since there are more than one row per x-y combination, ggplot adds things together by x value, which is what you'd expect out of a bar plot. Long story short, I wonder if what you actually want is a histogram here. Your dataset (hate_crime) only has one value of ZIP_CODE, so I'm not sure what plotting ZIP on the y-axis is supposed to visualize. A histogram would look like this:
hate_crime %>%
ggplot(., aes(x = UOR_DESC, , fill = UOR_DESC)) +
geom_histogram(stat = "count") +
labs(x = "UOR_DESC", fill = "UOR_DESC") +
theme_minimal() +
theme(axis.text.x=element_text (angle =45, hjust =1))
If, instead, you're trying to visualize how often each ZIP code shows up in each category, you'd have to approach things differently. Perhaps you're looking for something like this?
df %>%
ggplot(aes(x = UOR_DESC, fill = factor(ZIP_CODE))) +
geom_histogram(stat = "count") +
theme(axis.text.x=element_text (angle =45, hjust =1))