The Government Won’t Track Police Killings, So This 24-Year-Old Took the Lead

[eridani]

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/04/16/mapping-police-violence-fills-database-blanks-left-government?cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2015-04-16

There is no comprehensive national database of police killings. As a data scientist and activist, Sinyangwe wondered how advocates and policy makers could engage in any sort of meaningful conversation without those basic facts. On top of professional curiosity, Brown’s death hit home for Sinyangwe, who kicked around soccer balls growing up in the Florida neighborhood where Trayvon Martin was killed by gunfire.

“As a young black man, I felt unsafe,” Sinyangwe told TakePart. “This was happening everywhere—not just in Ferguson. Yet we didn’t really have the data to show how widespread this issue was, and how black people in particular are being targeted by police violence.”

Sinyangwe turned to the numbers that did exist. As a policy analyst at PolicyLink in Oakland, California, a research institute that works to advance economic and social justice, he is no stranger to data sets. He started with deaths tracked by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI but found that they significantly undercounted the victims, excluded location, and didn’t always include race. He overlaid the two data sets and then turned to crowdsourced databases created by journalists and advocates who were disturbed by the lack of data collected by the government, such as Fatal Encounters and Killed by Police. While existing sites offered a richer variety of information than government sources, they didn’t encompass as many incidents as Sinyangwe hoped to track, and some of the sites weren’t coded by race.

So he and fellow activists DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie, whom he met on Twitter, took on the task of sifting through the combined records to recheck and code every entry. After a few months, Mapping Police Violence was born. The project covers “90 percent of the universe of police killings according to the best research available out there,” Sinyangwe said, including whether or not the victim was armed or unarmed. Last year, the project found, 304 black people were killed by the police; 101 of them were unarmed.

[Suich]

1. Excellent! It's about time!

[DeSwiss]

2. K&R

[RobertEarl]

3. If the government truly cared

There would be little need for someone to assemble such data, it would be common knowledge supplied to newspapers, daily.

The government also tells us nukes are safe.

[Downwinder]

4. Lack of data that you would realistically expect to

be available shows care that it not be there.