Busting police brutality myths: Race, junk science, and big data
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The federal government doesn't collect information about police killings in any systemic way. What this means is that we can't actually tell you, as a hard fact, how many people were killed last year.
McKesson and his fellow Black Lives Matter organizers have created Mapping Police Violence to create a single-stop database with the most comprehensive data about police killings.
When it comes to filing complaints against officers, many states have policies in place that make it quite difficult for them to be held accountable.
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DERAY MCKESSON:
DeRay Mckesson is a civil rights activist, community organizer, and the host of Crooked Media's award-winning podcast, Pod Save the People. He started his career as an educator and came to prominence for his participation in, and documentation of, the Ferguson protests and the movement they birthed, and for publicly advocating for victims of police violence and to end mass incarceration. He's spoken at venues from the White House to the Oxford Union, at universities, and on TV. Named one of Time's 30 Most Influential People on the Internet and #11 on Fortune's World's Greatest Leaders list, he has received honorary doctorates from The New School and the Maryland Institute College of Art. A leading voice in the Black Lives Matter movement and the co-founder of Campaign Zero, a policy platform to end police violence, Mckesson lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
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TRANSCRIPT:
DERAY MCKESSON: A lot of people don't know is that any number you've ever heard about police violence comes through the aggregate of media reports. If you get killed in this country and a newspaper doesn't write about it, it's not covered on like a blog or like a TV or something, you literally don't exist in the data set. The federal government doesn't collect information about police killings in any systemic way. We can tell you the rainfall in Missouri in 1830, and we can't actually tell you how many people got killed, like, as a hard fact last year. We don't know it. What we know is like the aggregate of media reports, these incredible activists years ago set up these two big databases that essentially called like an advanced Google alerts of like police killings, and that is the source data for everything that you've ever seen on police killings. Some of the biggest databases that you might have heard of are like the Washington Post Database, fatal encounters killed by police.
We created Mapping Police Violence to create the single stop database that had the most comprehensive data about police killings. If you think about the Washington Post Database, for instance, they only have killings by officers on duty that use a gun. So say for example an officer goes home and runs somebody over with their car, like that's not counted. Say somebody is on duty and the officer runs you over with their car, not accounted. Eric Garner's death is not in the Washington Post Database. Why? Because he wasn't killed with a gun.
So we wanted to say that like whether you got killed by a taser, a chokehold, whether the officer was at home and like killed his wife off-duty, we consider all of those to be symptoms of the same sort of root problem. So that's why we created the database. And what we know is that, left to their own devices, that police will just never report this data. There are times where the state of Florida has reported zero police killings in entire spans of years, and you're like "We know that's not true, like we could just look at the news and see it wasn't zero!" So the data actually is really important for us to help locate what the problem is and what the solution should be.
And the last thing I'll say is that we have to figure out how to start talking about police violence beyond death. So we know that the police inflict damage in communities in ways like sexual assault, verbal abuse, those sort of things, and the data we have most readily available is about death, but because we only focus on death with the data, we're losing how the police impact women, how the police impact LGBT communities, like any other ways that don't result in death but are still really bad—and we have to figure out how to do that...
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