A blogger friend asked me to put together a quick abridged history of Fatal Encounters. Others might find this useful, too. I’ve had media around the world telling this story now. Well, there is one town where the news media doesn’t think this is a story, and I’m looking at it outside my window.
OK, first, I started laboring pretty much by myself back in 2012, building information, designing the website, collecting the data. I started doing the Fatal Encounters series in the Reno News & Review on Feb. 27, 2014. All the links are on the side of this August 28 story: http://www.newsreview.com/reno/police-psychology/content?oid=14648596
March 18: Then this story broke in TruthOut: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/22538-journalist-calls-for-accountability-in-police-killings
April 3: Project Censored picked it up with a blurb: http://www.projectcensored.org/journalist-calls-accountability-police-killings/
May 28: A friend of a friend but now a friend, former Nation editor JoAnn Wypijewski happened to be passing through town, so she stopped by for cocktails. That resulted:in this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-l9Ys3cd80fRzhpNG05eHFITmc/edit?usp=sharing
July 22: The far right side of Libertarians picked it up: http://zerogov.com/?p=3514
In the meantime, major national news outlets started talking about this issue of the Justice Department not collecting this information:
Scripps: http://www.10news.com/news/teens-shooting-highlights-need-for-tracking-people-killed-by-police This one is interesting to me because it shows the FBI is still lying Go here: https://www.fatalencounters.org/people-search/
Check Nevada and then each year you’re interested in.
The story’s interactive map showed: Nevada: 2010: 10; 2011: 15; 2012: 8
In Nevada, in 2010, 19 people were killed by police. In 2011, 18 people were killed by police. In 2012, 15 people were killed by police. That’s 52 compared to the government’s stated 33. Every incident is documented with a public document from the police or news story.
Here’s what USA Today said about the lack of a database (only don’t read the totally inaccurate and misleading headline):http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/14/police-killings-data/14060357/
NPR: http://www.npr.org/2014/08/21/342228794/ferguson-turns-lens-on-police-involved-killings-but-some-facts-are-few
Here’s a quick read regarding the law requiring the feds to collect data:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140822/07034228290/federal-law-ordering-us-attorney-general-to-gather-data-police-excessive-force-has-been-ignored-20-years.shtml
The biggest break came when on August 21, Max Read of Gawker contacted me to do a story. I’d sent him an email complaining about the lies the FBI tells about these numbers. http://gawker.com/what-ive-learned-from-two-years-collecting-data-on-poli-1625472836
August 26: Then Upworthy: http://www.upworthy.com/every-time-a-journalist-read-a-news-story-about-deaths-by-cops-he-noticed-one-detail-was-always-missing
Liberal radio picked Fatal Encounters up: Majority Report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE9-_aUFk84
Jim Bohannon: http://www.jimbotalk.net/programhighlights;jsessionid=86A8C078DEC19C4E4D73CD26559E21EC?pid=40307
Las Vegas NPR August 27: http://cpa.ds.npr.org/knpr/audio/2014/08/140827_Panel_Police_WEB.mp3
August 27: Then CNN and Jake Tapper: http://youtu.be/1wH5WGlsPNk
August 27: Then today’s Reddit Ask Me Anything: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2eyrdz/im_d_brian_burghart_a_journalist_who_was_offended/
VilaWeb in Barcelona, Spain: http://www.vilaweb.cat/noticia/4208651/20140830/mapa-topades-tragiques-policia-eua.html
BBC London: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-28946204
August 29: Columbia Journalism Review (Would you believe it, a laurel! Do I get to thank the academy?) http://m.cjr.org/303546/show/53defdbd7e3d84cc38b10f475f76e009?t=u913jtf5gqt5n16mta99biv2u1
To date, I’ve received more than a thousand crowd-submitted examples of officer-involved homicides that are moving through the proofing and copy-editing process. I’ve been receiving data analysis and visualizations from around the world. Everybody keeps telling me my timing was really good, that I’m somehow taking advantage of what happened in Ferguson. Really, my timing was good on May 18, 2012, when I started looking into this shit.