Deadspin is Crowdsourcing a Police Shooting Database

As noted last week here on Hit
& Run last week and on
FiveThirtyEight.com yesterday, there is
no comprehensive national database of shootings
by police. Though academics like
David Klinger and
Jim Fisher have been on the case for years, there hasn’t
been a coordinated effort to compile all the necessary data into
one place, until now.

As part of its coverage of the unrest in Ferguson, MO, following
the police shooting death of unarmed teenager, Michael Brown,
Deadspin, the hugely popular
Gawker Media-affiliated sports and pop culture website, is asking
its readers to help
crowdsource information on police shootings from 2011-2013.

For a few hours today, they were allowing their readers to
update a Google doc spreadsheet, which proved unwieldly due to a

limit on the number of concurrent users accessing the doc. They
have since moved to soliciting info via a submission form on the
site.  

The expected beta-testing kinks aside, you can
check out their submissions so far and see they’re off to a
pretty impressive start.

Hoping to avoid being deluged with redundant or inaccurate
data, they have provided these guidelines:

• Using Google’s search tools, isolate a single day (e.g. Jan. 1,
  2011, to Jan. 1, 2011) and search for the term “police involved
  shooting” (don’t use quotation marks). Use Chrome’s Incognito mode
  when searching to ensure you aren’t getting local results.
• Read each link on the first 10 pages of results; for any
  instances of shootings involving a police officer, log them in the
  spreadsheet.
• We’re looking at 2011, 2012, and 2013, and tracking date, name,
  age, gender, race/ethnicity, injured/killed, armed/unarmed, city,
  county, state, agency, number of shots, a brief summary, and a link
  to a story about the incident are to be filled out as best as
  possible given the information in all stories about the
  incident.
• Before starting in, take
  a look at the submissions here and pick a day that no one
  has begun. Remember, we’re starting off looking at just the past
  three years.
• Often, the first day of reports will not have personal details,
  and a second search of subsequent days will fill in more of the
  story.
• A later death, after a person is hospitalized in a
  police-involved shooting, is considered a death for our
  purposes.
• We are looking for any incidence of a police officer shooting
  and hitting another person.
• We are not looking for incidences of police
  officers discharging their weapons and hitting no
  one. In a perfect world these would be tracked, since often
  the only difference is that the shot missed, but these incidents
  are not as thoroughly reported and would probably bias the
  data.
• Please keep the data as neat as possible. Work within specific
  months, make sure you’re in the correct year, keep the columns
  clean and add peripheral information in the Summary portion,
  etc.

Considering
the sheer volume of highly personal information the government
collects and analyzes (often without consent), it is simply
outrageous that the public has to struggle to find even the raw
data tallying something as vital as government agents shooting
citizens. 

Deadspin’s efforts at providing transparency on police
shootings are a great example of public volunteerism stepping up to
fill a void deliberately created by the government, which would
rather not have this conversation. 

Now, who will be the first to step up and crowdsource the data behind
police shooting dogs?