Busting police brutality myths: Race, junk science, and big data | DeRay Mckesson

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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. One of the limitations is that most police departments definitely don’t make that data publicly available or don’t collect it in any systemic way. So you think about police departments like Baltimore where so much of the data is on paper, you’re like “Well, who is sitting down analyzing ten million records on paper? Nobody right now,” and that becomes like a challenge.

So what we found were a couple myth busters. We found things like there’s this idea that community violence and police violence are related, so in communities where there’s just a lot of violence people say that “the police just have to be there, because the communities are violent and so the police must be there. And because the police must be there it’s just more likely that they’ll probably engage in violence against communities.” And we found that that’s just not true. There are places where there’s a lot of community violence and almost no police violence, and the inverse is also true that there’s no real relationship between community violence and police violence. We also found is that black people are actually more likely to be unarmed than any other race of people who are killed by police.