Mapping Police Violence: Review

Reviewers: Kevin Pham

Review Began: 27 March 2022

Review Ended: TBD

Project links: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

Data and Sources

Data from Fatal Encounters; Incident alert data from Meltwater and Google News Alerts

Processes

6-step process:

1. Incident Identification is done primarily through Meltwater and Google News Alerts
2. Incident Information Extraction: Researchers extract out demographic and contextual data from the source
3. Incident Coding & Review” Each Incident is reviewed for unique variables and coded by researchers
4. Second-Review System: Second-reviewer corrects and updates any incorrect or missing information which triggers incident to be published onto MPV database.
5. Incident Validation: System conducts periodic review of incidents to validate and match with following data sources: Fatal Encounters, The Washington Post, Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database
6. Missing Data: System conducts periodic review of incidents to input missing information from initial incident input

Presentation

• Homepage consists of interactive data visualizations that visualize specifically police killings in the US using different visualization formats (including a map, bar graph, calendar, etc.)
• Filters can be used on the home page to specify by race, state, and year
• The database (which includes police violence incidents beyond just killings) is formatted in a Google Sheet

Digital Tools Used to Build It

• Meltwater and Google News Alerts for tracking incident reports
• Google Sheets for database maintenance
• No information on visualization tools

Languages

English

Review

MappingPoliceViolence.org is an interactive website and database owned by Campaign Zero, an American police reform campaign and non-profit launched in late 2015. The website, kickstarted by former Campaign Zero member Samuel Sinyangwe, was launched in response to the murder to Michael Brown and to support political unrest in Ferguson. The data displays a comprehensive account of police violence in the United States with a special focus on fatal incidents, claiming to capture 92% of the total number of police killings since 2013. In conjunction with the project’s own data collection process (using Meltwater and Google New Alerts), the project also uses external data sources, specifically the University of Southern California’s “Fatal Encounters” database, and the Washington Post’s “Police Shootings Database”.

The website’s key offerings are the five different interactive infographics on its home page (corroborated with filters): A “mad libs” style number generator, a bar chart, a calendar chart, a line chart (month by a cumulative number of killings), and a map. Each visualization filters specifically for fatal incidents by default, though the website also links to an excel sheet with incidents both fatal and non-fatal. As mentioned above, data collection uses existing data sources along with alerts using Google News Alerts and in collaboration with Meltwater. Additionally, the home page allows users to filter by year, location, and “victim”, the last of which is more specifically an ethnicity/race filter. Apart from the home page, the site also includes three other pages: “About the project,” “Data/Methodology,” and “Research and Resources.” There is no information on the visualization tools used. Overall, the site is designed in a way intentionally simple, allowing users to retrieve numerical data across time, geographical space, and racial groups using a limited number of graphics and filters. The site seems to promote itself for quick knowledge and interest, presumably so that users can be led to Campaign Zero’s work as a whole.

The goal/aim of the project, as stated on its About page, is a matter of state accountability: “Law enforcement agencies and the government fail to provide accurate numbers on the number of lives taken at the hands of police. While there have been efforts by the government to document the number of police killings such as the USA National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) or a recent FBI program which has failed to deliver results as of 2021, there is still no way to understand the scope of police violence.” Put differently, the project grounds itself in a call for data transparency, and that such a call has not been adequately answered by “governmental databases.” While these ethical grounds seem to cohere in and through radical movements in opposition to the State; developed over the greater part of a century; the project’s relationship to the government is murky at best.

Indeed, Campaign Zero’s work is first and foremost reformist, and notoriously so. The non-profit and its founders have been and continue to be strongly criticized by grassroots activists for its ability to transform public anger against the State into watered-down policy proposals and individual profit. Notably, the organization’s founders have strong relationships with elected officials. Additionally, MappingPoliceViolence.org as it stands today is actually a produced copy of Sinyangwe’s original project (which now lives on mappingpoliceviolence.squarespace.com), the former replicating the latter’s data collection/production methods to a tee, even as Sinyangwe formally left the organization in 2021 without authorizing the reproduction of his work. Sinyangwe pushed a cease-and-desist order on Campaign Zero for the replication of his work in February of 2022. With this in mind, we might ask: For what are the project’s sources of funding, and are these sources not entangled with both government and corporate interests?

However, my qualms regarding the project are two-fold; on the one hand as it concerns the issues outlined above, but on the other, as it concerns the limits of communicating anti-black violence. The project is grounded in a set of assumptions that, over time, have begun to lose hold: Firstly, that data transparency can ignite social movement, and secondly that the scope of anti-black violence can be characterized comparatively to other racial groups. Arguably, the public response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020 makes clear that the knowledge (whether quantitative or qualitative) of racialized police violence is overdetermined by political orientation—conservative, liberal, radical; reformist, or abolitionist. MappingPoliceViolence.org’s approach to data transparency does little to produce the realization that perhaps the police should be abolished, much less an abolitionist mindset. Indeed, The StopAAPIHate.org archive is a data-centered campaign conceptually similar to MappingPoliceViolence.org that has noticeably corroborated the production of state legislation that has increased police presence nationally. Data transparency, in this case, notably produces anti-black violence.

Taking this further: MappingPoliceViolence.org allows users to filter police killings by racial group, which seems to reveal the assumption that violence across races comes from the same place; or more generally, that the scope of racial violence can be understood quantitatively. Put simply, there is an assumption that more deaths equal more oppression, or that a police officer would kill, say, an Asian person for the same reason they would kill a black person (in fact, the database shows that more Pacific Islanders were killed by police than Black people in 2021). However, we might do better to instead think with Frank B. Wilderson III’s claim in his book Red, White, & Black: that non-Black racial violence is grounded and contingent, while anti-black violence is unthought and gratuitous. Taking this idea seriously might allow us to not only realize the faults of MappingPoliceViolence.org as a tool in the production of “justice,” but to reconsider what exactly “justice” is for the liberal and the conservative vs. the radical—or even better, to think the call for “justice” as an always-already racialized demand.