Below is the introduction to an article that I worked on from August to December 2020. The complete article can be read here: https://www.leonardonicoletti.com/work/deathtoll . This article received an honorable mention from The Pudding as one of their favorite non-commercial visual and data-driven stories of 2020.
The article is an effort to visualize the death toll of policing, that is, it speaks of the people who lose their lives when interacting with the police. It also discusses unsuccessful police reform efforts, and the possibilities offered by police and prison abolition.
The Death Toll of Policing
Visualizing deaths caused by policing in the United States
Data analysis and visualization by Leonardo Nicoletti — Writing by Orlando Nicoletti — Title art by Antoine Balouka
The police is an institution that we have made central to our societies. We invest enormous amounts of money, time, and effort in its daily operation, in its enhancement, and in its reform; we are deeply committed to sustaining it. Yet many of us spend little time thinking about what the police actually do. This is especially true for those of us who are the most privileged, who don't interact with the police unless we want to. De facto, our society is at ease with the police committing various forms of violence — surveillance, arrest, detainment, and even murder — because it is considered legitimate, necessary, integral to our well-being. This soothing illusion has only been able to persist, however, because of a consistent disregard for those on the receiving end of this violence, for the individuals and communities who experience the police not in theory but in practice.
For as long as police have existed, those who are policed have denounced the harassment, humiliation, and abuse perpetrated by law enforcement, as well as the destructive long-term impacts of policing on people and communities. It has been easy to ignore these voices because the most policed are often the most marginalized, and also because victims of the police are made illegitimate by design: since the police only inflict violence on those who deserve it, to be violated by police makes one both deserving of violence and undeserving of a voice, et voilà.
Yet our failure to reckon with the reality of policing is also caused by the systematic opacity of police departments. In the U.S., there is no concerted governmental effort to keep track of acts of violence committed by police. This lack of data is especially disturbing when it comes to civilian deaths caused by police. The Las Vegas Review-Journal writes, "The nation’s leading law enforcement agency [FBI] collects vast amounts of information on crime nationwide, but missing from this clearinghouse are statistics on where, how often, and under what circumstances police use deadly force. In fact, no one anywhere comprehensively tracks the most significant act police can do in the line of duty: take a life.”
To address this situation, journalist and researcher D. Brian Burghart undertook the project of compiling all civilian deaths caused by police in the United States, from Jan. 1st 2000 to today. This dataset, which is freely available on his website fatalencounters.org, is the only comprehensive record of the deaths caused by policing in the United States. This includes “all deaths that happen when police are present or that are caused by police: on-duty, off-duty, criminal, line-of-duty, local, federal, intentional, accidental – all of them.” To be sure, this data consists of more than the murders committed by police officers; it also speaks of the people who die from the consequences of an arrest, those who die during a pursuit or firefight, or those who take their lives during a standoff with the police. All of these lives constitute the death toll of policing, that is, the lives lost because of the presence and operation of the police. Burghart writes, "If this dataset falls short of your expectations in any way, contact your representatives. Local, state and federal agencies don’t require collection of complete data regarding the numbers and characteristics of people their employees kill because they don’t want citizens to have access to transparent and verifiable data. The State’s reasons for this are more opaque.”
In an effort to visualize the death toll of policing in the United States and to explore some of the dynamics that underlie this phenomenon, we draw on data from Fatal Encounters and put it in conversation with information about the governance of the places where these deaths occur.
Please head over here to read the complete article, with all the figures and visualizations that inform the analysis: https://www.leonardonicoletti.com/work/deathtoll