phill4paul
02-28-2014, 08:44 AM
Fatal Encounters
A step toward creating an impartial, comprehensive and searchable national database of people killed during interactions with law enforcement
http://www.fatalencounters.org/spreadsheets/
Why FE exists
This project to create a comprehensive national database of people who are killed through interactions with police started with a simple question: How often does that happen?
May 18, 2012: I was on my way home from work when I noticed a bunch of cop cars down by the Truckee River. As the editor of a newspaper, the Reno News & Review, I was curious. We’re a weekly, so we don’t much cover the police beat—not the day-to-day stuff anyway—but it’s my nature to satisfy my curiosity. So when I got home, I turned on the scanner app on my cell phone, fired up my laptop, and poured a glass of red wine.
It turned out the police had pulled over a stolen car, and they’d shot and killed the driver. (Jace Herndon, 41, we found out later.) Honestly—and not because I’m one of those hard-boiled, cynical types—I wasn’t particularly surprised or offended. Criminals often come to a bad end.
But again, I’m an editor, so I noticed when a gaping hole appeared in every single news story I read about the incident. There was no context. I kept looking for a sentence that said something like “This was x person killed by police in Washoe County this year.”
But it was never there. I searched the web for a few minutes, came up short, and started doing something productive. I simply considered the missing information a failing of the local news media, and I moved on. Still, its absence bugged me. I felt as though I’d accidentally left my wallet on my nightstand; while I knew I could retrieve it if I needed to, not having it was bothersome.
And then a few months later, an 18-year-old, naked and unarmed college student, Gil Collar, was killed by University of South Alabama police on Dec. 6, 2012. Early reports said the officer never got within five feet of the kid, and no non-lethal methods were tried. “Wow, how often does that happen?”
It was a national news story. But again, a complete lack of context. And this wasn’t some mid-sized city’s overburdened media workforce not reporting, these were the nation’s biggest news sources, like the Associated Press and the New York Times. I began to search in earnest, but nowhere could I find out how many people died during interactions with police in the United States. There are all kinds of articles that point out the issue, for example, I kept returning to the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s series Deadly Force (Nov. 28, 2011) “The nation’s leading law enforcement agency [FBI] collects vast amounts of information on crime nationwide, but missing from this clearinghouse are statistics on where, how often, and under what circumstances police use deadly force. In fact, no one anywhere comprehensively tracks the most significant act police can do in the line of duty: take a life.”
Try as I might, I just can’t wrap my head around that idea. In the 21st century, the only reason this information would not be tracked, data-based and available to the public is because somebody somewhere decided Americans shouldn’t know how many people are killed by police and under what circumstances.
No giant Big Brother conspiracy theory necessary. The information is out there. It’s not censored or hidden, even if it is under-reported. Certainly, though, it’s uncollected by the logical entity to assemble it, the U.S. Department of Justice.
But it is out there.
Somebody just has to collect it. That is this project’s vision and goal: a comprehensive, searchable database of people who die for any reason through fatal police encounters.
How to help
Essentially, there are four ways to help create this database of people killed during encounters with police. The first and easiest is with a little cash. While I expect to hit up nonprofit funders of journalism, more parts of this project have to go live before I feel comfortable asking people for money. In the meantime, I’m paying for web hosting, software, some development, classes, FBI FOIA charges, etc., out of my own pocket. And believe me, as a single parent, a double master’s student, and a lifelong journalist, there’s not a hell of a lot in my pocket. Lint, maybe.
Local public records requests
Second, journalists and other interested people can print out and submit public record requests in their own states from the “For public records requests” tab. The idea behind this is that locals know their own state’s public records laws. This site provides the names and mailing addresses of all the law enforcement agencies in any geographic area in the United States.
This database is available to anyone for any use. It’s from a public document, although I don’t think it was available until this database was created. In exchange for its use, particularly if it’s being used to make public records requests regarding fatal encounters with police, I’d appreciate it if you’d drop me an email at d.brian@fatalencounters.org, telling me what agencies you’ve made requests of (county and state) and, when a response is received, a copy of the results so the information on the incident database can be updated and/or verified.
New incidents
Third, for new incidents, submit directly to the site by clicking on the heading “Submit fatal encounters,” filling in available information, and hitting submit. It’s the nature of how this information trickles out that initial reports are spotty at best. It’s probably a good idea to allow a few days to pass and then begin researching and inputting the data. However, something is better than nothing, and if a few days pass, and the news media or law enforcement have not posted more complete data, please submit what information is available. This is a work in progress, and partial information will help focus future public information requests and enable further research.
Older incidents
The fourth way people can help is by updating partial information I’ve scraped from the internet regarding incidents going back to 2000. To accomplish this, I’ve created a Google spreadsheet of incidents scraped from various sources, including Wikipedia, here: http://tinyurl.com/cz3rafa.
Open the spreadsheet and look for a row that has a lot of empty fields. Open your favorite search engine in a new tab so you can switch back and forth from the search-engine tab to the spreadsheet. Column Q should have enough information to link to the original story that this partial information came from–just make it your search string. Sometimes Column Q will have a URL for a published piece. It’s easiest to start there just to get an idea of the environment in which you’re working. For example, it may be as easy as searching at the same media source for a follow-up story to fill in the gaps.
However, few things are easy.
After filling in any data from the original source that didn’t make it to the spreadsheet, I search the subject’s name and other pertinent information. Let’s use a random incident, Line 757, James Popkowski. For reasons of illustration, let’s pretend Column Q had no additional information to fill in empty cells. As an example, I’ll create a new row (Line 758) above Popkowski’s and fill in the blanks. First thing you do, is right-click on the row number, click on the paint bucket and select a red background, so no one else will accidentally select the one you’re working on.
Search James Popkowski. We actually got lucky on this one because he was a former Marine whose death illustrated the difficulties veterans face when dealing with the medical treatment provided by the Veterans Administration so there was a lot of media attention. http://www.kjonline.com/news/report-cites-failures-in-vets-treatment_2010-12-13.html?pagenum=full
Start by going across the columns: Add the middle initial ‘F.’ to the name. Add his age, 37, to Column C, and his sex to Column D. Next right-click his picture, Copy Image URL, and paste the result into Column E. To get the information for Column I, do a separate search for Togus Veterans Affairs Medical Center, which results in the address 1 VA Center Augusta, ME 04330. Do you notice the error in the original entry? Popkowski was from Medway, Maine, but he was killed in Augusta, Maine. Put in the correct information.
There is another problem with Column M, Agency responsible for death. We don’t know, yet. The story we are looking at says, “Popkowski died July 8 from a single gunshot wound to the neck after a confrontation with a Veterans Affairs police officer and two game wardens.” We’ll look for more specific information later.
That’s about as far as we can get from this article. Let’s look a little deeper into our search results. You may want to copy this article’s URL into Column Q, just because it has so many details.
Look at the next search result. This is about as official as it gets, and it’s actually the report the first story was written from: Findings of the Attorney General in the Matter of the Shooting Death of James F. Popkowski on July 8, 2010 at the Togus VA Hospital: http://www.maine.gov/tools/whatsnew/index.php?topic=AGOffice_Press&id=173931&v=article Since this is the better, more official source, I exchange this URL for the one that we just pasted into Column Q.
From reading the report, we see that an officer from the VA police and a game warden fired simultaneously, and although forensics must have known from which gun the killing shot originated, the report doesn’t say. The best we can do is list both: Veterans Affairs Police/Maine Warden Service.
In the section Analysis and Conclusion, we see that the use of deadly force was found to be justified.
All that’s left to do is add your name or nickname to the information in Column R, and add your email address to Column S, if you so choose.
We got really fortunate with this entry. Usually, details are scant, and some tricks, like doing the initial name search, then hitting the “Search Tools” option, then clicking “Any Time,” then choosing “Custom Range,” and limiting the search to within 60 days of the death are necessary. Sometimes Zip Codes are difficult to find, but they’re very important because the mapping will depend on them. I use http://www.unitedstateszipcodes.org/ , but sometimes I have to use Google Maps to drill down if an intersection is all that’s available for a location.
The last thing I’d ask is that you would highlight the row you just completed by clicking the row’s number, then clicking the paint bucket on the toolbar, and change the row from a red to a green background.
Thank you,
Brian
A step toward creating an impartial, comprehensive and searchable national database of people killed during interactions with law enforcement
http://www.fatalencounters.org/spreadsheets/
Why FE exists
This project to create a comprehensive national database of people who are killed through interactions with police started with a simple question: How often does that happen?
May 18, 2012: I was on my way home from work when I noticed a bunch of cop cars down by the Truckee River. As the editor of a newspaper, the Reno News & Review, I was curious. We’re a weekly, so we don’t much cover the police beat—not the day-to-day stuff anyway—but it’s my nature to satisfy my curiosity. So when I got home, I turned on the scanner app on my cell phone, fired up my laptop, and poured a glass of red wine.
It turned out the police had pulled over a stolen car, and they’d shot and killed the driver. (Jace Herndon, 41, we found out later.) Honestly—and not because I’m one of those hard-boiled, cynical types—I wasn’t particularly surprised or offended. Criminals often come to a bad end.
But again, I’m an editor, so I noticed when a gaping hole appeared in every single news story I read about the incident. There was no context. I kept looking for a sentence that said something like “This was x person killed by police in Washoe County this year.”
But it was never there. I searched the web for a few minutes, came up short, and started doing something productive. I simply considered the missing information a failing of the local news media, and I moved on. Still, its absence bugged me. I felt as though I’d accidentally left my wallet on my nightstand; while I knew I could retrieve it if I needed to, not having it was bothersome.
And then a few months later, an 18-year-old, naked and unarmed college student, Gil Collar, was killed by University of South Alabama police on Dec. 6, 2012. Early reports said the officer never got within five feet of the kid, and no non-lethal methods were tried. “Wow, how often does that happen?”
It was a national news story. But again, a complete lack of context. And this wasn’t some mid-sized city’s overburdened media workforce not reporting, these were the nation’s biggest news sources, like the Associated Press and the New York Times. I began to search in earnest, but nowhere could I find out how many people died during interactions with police in the United States. There are all kinds of articles that point out the issue, for example, I kept returning to the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s series Deadly Force (Nov. 28, 2011) “The nation’s leading law enforcement agency [FBI] collects vast amounts of information on crime nationwide, but missing from this clearinghouse are statistics on where, how often, and under what circumstances police use deadly force. In fact, no one anywhere comprehensively tracks the most significant act police can do in the line of duty: take a life.”
Try as I might, I just can’t wrap my head around that idea. In the 21st century, the only reason this information would not be tracked, data-based and available to the public is because somebody somewhere decided Americans shouldn’t know how many people are killed by police and under what circumstances.
No giant Big Brother conspiracy theory necessary. The information is out there. It’s not censored or hidden, even if it is under-reported. Certainly, though, it’s uncollected by the logical entity to assemble it, the U.S. Department of Justice.
But it is out there.
Somebody just has to collect it. That is this project’s vision and goal: a comprehensive, searchable database of people who die for any reason through fatal police encounters.
How to help
Essentially, there are four ways to help create this database of people killed during encounters with police. The first and easiest is with a little cash. While I expect to hit up nonprofit funders of journalism, more parts of this project have to go live before I feel comfortable asking people for money. In the meantime, I’m paying for web hosting, software, some development, classes, FBI FOIA charges, etc., out of my own pocket. And believe me, as a single parent, a double master’s student, and a lifelong journalist, there’s not a hell of a lot in my pocket. Lint, maybe.
Local public records requests
Second, journalists and other interested people can print out and submit public record requests in their own states from the “For public records requests” tab. The idea behind this is that locals know their own state’s public records laws. This site provides the names and mailing addresses of all the law enforcement agencies in any geographic area in the United States.
This database is available to anyone for any use. It’s from a public document, although I don’t think it was available until this database was created. In exchange for its use, particularly if it’s being used to make public records requests regarding fatal encounters with police, I’d appreciate it if you’d drop me an email at d.brian@fatalencounters.org, telling me what agencies you’ve made requests of (county and state) and, when a response is received, a copy of the results so the information on the incident database can be updated and/or verified.
New incidents
Third, for new incidents, submit directly to the site by clicking on the heading “Submit fatal encounters,” filling in available information, and hitting submit. It’s the nature of how this information trickles out that initial reports are spotty at best. It’s probably a good idea to allow a few days to pass and then begin researching and inputting the data. However, something is better than nothing, and if a few days pass, and the news media or law enforcement have not posted more complete data, please submit what information is available. This is a work in progress, and partial information will help focus future public information requests and enable further research.
Older incidents
The fourth way people can help is by updating partial information I’ve scraped from the internet regarding incidents going back to 2000. To accomplish this, I’ve created a Google spreadsheet of incidents scraped from various sources, including Wikipedia, here: http://tinyurl.com/cz3rafa.
Open the spreadsheet and look for a row that has a lot of empty fields. Open your favorite search engine in a new tab so you can switch back and forth from the search-engine tab to the spreadsheet. Column Q should have enough information to link to the original story that this partial information came from–just make it your search string. Sometimes Column Q will have a URL for a published piece. It’s easiest to start there just to get an idea of the environment in which you’re working. For example, it may be as easy as searching at the same media source for a follow-up story to fill in the gaps.
However, few things are easy.
After filling in any data from the original source that didn’t make it to the spreadsheet, I search the subject’s name and other pertinent information. Let’s use a random incident, Line 757, James Popkowski. For reasons of illustration, let’s pretend Column Q had no additional information to fill in empty cells. As an example, I’ll create a new row (Line 758) above Popkowski’s and fill in the blanks. First thing you do, is right-click on the row number, click on the paint bucket and select a red background, so no one else will accidentally select the one you’re working on.
Search James Popkowski. We actually got lucky on this one because he was a former Marine whose death illustrated the difficulties veterans face when dealing with the medical treatment provided by the Veterans Administration so there was a lot of media attention. http://www.kjonline.com/news/report-cites-failures-in-vets-treatment_2010-12-13.html?pagenum=full
Start by going across the columns: Add the middle initial ‘F.’ to the name. Add his age, 37, to Column C, and his sex to Column D. Next right-click his picture, Copy Image URL, and paste the result into Column E. To get the information for Column I, do a separate search for Togus Veterans Affairs Medical Center, which results in the address 1 VA Center Augusta, ME 04330. Do you notice the error in the original entry? Popkowski was from Medway, Maine, but he was killed in Augusta, Maine. Put in the correct information.
There is another problem with Column M, Agency responsible for death. We don’t know, yet. The story we are looking at says, “Popkowski died July 8 from a single gunshot wound to the neck after a confrontation with a Veterans Affairs police officer and two game wardens.” We’ll look for more specific information later.
That’s about as far as we can get from this article. Let’s look a little deeper into our search results. You may want to copy this article’s URL into Column Q, just because it has so many details.
Look at the next search result. This is about as official as it gets, and it’s actually the report the first story was written from: Findings of the Attorney General in the Matter of the Shooting Death of James F. Popkowski on July 8, 2010 at the Togus VA Hospital: http://www.maine.gov/tools/whatsnew/index.php?topic=AGOffice_Press&id=173931&v=article Since this is the better, more official source, I exchange this URL for the one that we just pasted into Column Q.
From reading the report, we see that an officer from the VA police and a game warden fired simultaneously, and although forensics must have known from which gun the killing shot originated, the report doesn’t say. The best we can do is list both: Veterans Affairs Police/Maine Warden Service.
In the section Analysis and Conclusion, we see that the use of deadly force was found to be justified.
All that’s left to do is add your name or nickname to the information in Column R, and add your email address to Column S, if you so choose.
We got really fortunate with this entry. Usually, details are scant, and some tricks, like doing the initial name search, then hitting the “Search Tools” option, then clicking “Any Time,” then choosing “Custom Range,” and limiting the search to within 60 days of the death are necessary. Sometimes Zip Codes are difficult to find, but they’re very important because the mapping will depend on them. I use http://www.unitedstateszipcodes.org/ , but sometimes I have to use Google Maps to drill down if an intersection is all that’s available for a location.
The last thing I’d ask is that you would highlight the row you just completed by clicking the row’s number, then clicking the paint bucket on the toolbar, and change the row from a red to a green background.
Thank you,
Brian