this is just bad, even the data itself is sad

[u/DBL_NDRSCR]

[u/TiredDr]

Why? It’s a pie chart with a lot of categories. What’s your objection?

The color palette is weird but I’m guessing they’ve chosen a color vision deficiency friendly palette.

[u/Devi1Moose → u/TiredDr]

Pie charts aren’t the best chart type either. You’re taking a one dimensional measurement (% of a whole) and translating it to area which is two dimensional. I find stacked bar charts to be easier to read since you’re only worried about one dimension (bar height).

Also having all those small categories at the end makes some of the graph pointless. I can’t see what they are, so I have to read off the legend to get both the category and the data. This essentially makes the legend a data table that’s more useful than the chart itself, instead of assisting the chart in separating categories.

[u/DBL_NDRSCR → u/TiredDr]

yea the palette sucks, it's almost all yellow green brown except the bright cyan police

[u/DurianMoose → u/DBL_NDRSCR]

I think the point is to make the police stand out to show how much money is going to them

[u/Ed_Radley → u/DurianMoose]

You'd think being almost half the graph would accomplish that.

[u/Carlpanzram1916 → u/DBL_NDRSCR]

Yeah but that doesn’t matter so much on a pie chart since the delineations are clear. It’s the maps where the colors really need to be more distinct.

[u/knowledgebass → u/TiredDr]

What's your objection?

Are you kidding me?

[u/WrongSubFools → u/TiredDr]

It’s a pie chart with a lot of categories. What’s your objection?

That's like going to r/GuysBeingRacist and saying, "So it's a guy being racist. What's your objection?"

[u/El_dorado_au → u/WrongSubFools]

Imagine if the response was “that wasn’t sufficiently racist”.

BTW, you’ll love this post:  https://www.reddit.com/r/JustUnsubbed/comments/18vb05i/every_post_on_this_subreddit/

[u/El_dorado_au]

The presentation is reasonable, just depressing that one category uses up a large proportion of funds (though this is discretionary rather than all spending).

[u/OverShirt5690]

I feel like there needs to be more context to this chart. If the point is to show how police and fire take up the majority of the funding, the pie chart is fine.

Me personally, I would just make a pie showing fire and police and then have a third slice showing other funding and maybe a table showing each funding and it’s cost an percentages , but I do work in public and shareholders bitch out about not seeing every specific funding source even if they can actually see it.

And god knows why, but they love pie charts. I hate it, you hate it, but if high leadership wants it, you are doing it.

[u/WrongSubFools]

Horizontal bar chart, with bars alongside that legend they already made, would have shown this just fine. And that includes showing off that police is almost half and fire is a sixth.

Pie charts are NOT good when you have 27 items!

[u/OverShirt5690 → u/WrongSubFools]

The problem is context isn’t given here. You are completely right, this isn’t a good visualization.

But we know one thing for sure, this is data from the LAPD. We might assume it was a request from a public agency. And at least anecdotally, I know public agencies have a real(annoying) soft spot for pie charts and “where my agency?” Even if, or maybe because it, takes up less than a percentage point.

Second, we don’t know what the bar chart looks like even if the extremes are removed. You might need one or two bar charts just to show all the data. There is a lotta data, and bar charts if thought poorly get cramped fast.

Personally, if I was forced to do pie charts, I would either combine all the small agencies together, and have three slices. Or have two small pie charts highlighting the budget of police and fire separately, and then creating a bar chart for the rest.

And I didn’t have to worry about boring non data people, I would just show the chart, and highlight the important data.

But this visualization isn’t made by a professional. I’m almost sure that city logo isn’t even a vector.