Rachel Shin – LO 8 – Mapping Police Violence

In 2015, Deray Mckesson and Samuel Sinyangwe shared their beliefs in the imbalance of social roles between police and population and sought out to create a data visualization that shone light on the police violence that was shoved under the carpet.

Deray Mckesson, a government and legal studies from Bowdoin College, found his passion and embarked upon his path as an activist as he participated in a protest and discovered the ability of Twitter to tell stories in real-time. Prompted by police brutality tweets tweeted at him minutes after occurrence, Mckesson sought out to translate quantitative data into one of many stories to be told. Samuel Sinyangwe is a researcher and activist who studied race, politics, economics, and class at Stanford University who found his passion for activism after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida where Sinyangwe had regularly gone to for sports practice. After discovering how real the scenario of police brutality could be, Sinyangwe sought to develop an organization that used digital media to support Black Lives Matter activism.

In the video, Mckesson and Sinyangwe presented their ideas and beliefs through three main points: data, lived reality, and numbers & policy in a comfortable manner rather than with a business/professional tone to eliminate the presenter-audience barrier. They also answered audience members’ questions to better persuade them the benefits of their data visualization.

Mckesson and Sinyangwe developed a dataset-based map that pictured a timeline that can be scrubbed through that colorized and highlighted locations of police violence. I believe that this was created through loops, arrays, and functions that allowed the program to run through the dataset of cited police violence accounts and locations. The loop and functions then allowed Mckesson and Sinyangwe to develop an interactive map that allowed audience members to see for themselves how often police violence occurs. I admired this particular project because it allows an Internet-user like me to visually see how real this modern-day issue really is. Growing up in a sheltered bubble, I never considered the weight of police brutality, so this data visualization map breaks that wall of ignorance.