The origins of mappingpoliceviolence.org...

Like many Americans, Sam Sinyangwe had a lot of unanswered questions after black teen Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer by a white police officer. The 24-year-old knew unarmed black people were being killed by police across the country, but he didn’t know how many, or where it happened the most.

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 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.

[For more on this story, by Rebecca McCray, go to: http://www.takepart.com/articl...anks-left-government]