Thank you to Todd Quinn, Associate Professor, Business & Economics Librarian, University Libraries, University of New Mexico.
Black Lives Matter protests. An unnamed geospatial analyst has been mapping “every town or city I can find where a George Floyd / Black Lives Matter protest, action, or vigil has occurred since May 25” — more than 2,600 so far. The data files powering the map include each city’s name, state/region, country, coordinates, and the date it was added. Related…
Police violence at the BLM protests. Several groups are collecting examples of disproportionate police responses to the protests against police brutality. One such collection, spurred by criminal defense attorney T. Greg Doucette, has compiled hundreds of instances of “unnecessary violence by law enforcement officers against civilians”; for each one, the underlying spreadsheet provides the city and state of the incident, links to visual documentation on Twitter and YouTube, and a short description. Another collection, which emerged from the /r/2020PoliceBrutality subreddit and seeks “to accumulate and contextualize evidence of police brutality during the 2020 George Floyd protests,” also includes incident dates, an interactive map, and APIs. Related…
Police reforms and union contracts. Campaign Zero’s 8cantwait.org advocates for eight specific reforms to curtail police officers’ use of force, including bans on chokeholds, requiring de-escalation tactics, and establishing comprehensive reporting. The organization has compiled the use of force policies for 100 large police departments, and determined whether they’ve instituted these reforms. (Direct CSV download here.) And at checkthepolice.org, the organization has gathered police union contracts in major cities and assessed whether they contain language makes it harder to hold officers accountable for misconduct.
Police militarization. The US Defense Logistic Agency’s Law Enforcement Support Office sends surplus Department of Defense equipment to local law enforcement agencies, through an arrangement known as the 1033 program. The Pentagon publishes quarterly updates of the equipment transferred — which can range from coffee makers to rifles to entire aircraft — but only began doing so after the program came under intense scrutiny for its role in the militarized police response to the 2014 Ferguson protests and police militarization in general. Related: Despite the criticisms, the 1033 program has sent police departments hundreds of millions of dollars in military equipment since Ferguson, including more than 490 mine-resistant vehicles, Buzzfeed News' John Templon reports.
The Sentencing Project
It compiles state-level criminal justice data from a variety of sources. In the State Data Map, you can roll over states for a quick snapshot of key figures from each state and click on any state to see more data. You can also use the dropdown menu to display different datasets on the map. Under Detailed State Data, you can access full datasets for each state and compare states. In State Rankings, you can see how states stack up against each other in different areas.