The Counted by The Guardian
This all started for me in January of 2009. That was when the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police killed Oscar Grant.
Oscar Grant was face down on the ground when the BART police shot him in the back, point blank. Oscar Grant worked as butcher at a popular high-end market in our neighborhood and word spread quickly. No one could imagine the police shooting someone who was face down on the ground, it sounded like murder. Especially not someone as nice and easy going as the new father, Oscar Grant. He was well-liked by co-workers and those of us who shop at the market.
Luckily, the shooting was captured by many smartphone wielding citizens who happened by and also could not believe their eyes. For me, this was the beginning of the end. It was the beginning of the end of my ability to believe that the police are trustworthy. This caused me a lot of cognitive dissonance because my dealings with the police had never been bad and I’m brown.
Over the next few years, I became more aware of people being killed by police. My sphere of awareness was now open to the idea and or reality so I began to see. I still had a hard time believing that many police officers are bullies and or criminals. Had it not been for the explosion of videos of police killing people, like here, here and here, I still might not have believed it.
By the time the NYPD killed Eric Garner, on camera, I was done. My trust and or faith in police had evaporated. I now view police about the same as I view criminals. I don’t like or dislike them. I just don’t trust them. The next time I’m on a jury, I will assume any police testimony is less than credible.
At this point I became interested in learning more about the problem of police killing citizens. I wanted to know how often it happened and why it happened. I also wanted to know how widespread of a problem it is. I learned a lot. The first thing I learned was that there is no data on number of people killed by police in the US. I could not believed the government did not have this data. It was at this point that I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. It was at this point that it began to occur to me that this problem might be huge in scope.
A few months later I was lucky enough to come across a brilliant solution to the fact that the government has no data about how often US citizens are killed by police. It’s called The Counted: People Killed by Police in the US. The Counted is a brilliantly conceived and executed tool for tracking the number of people killed in the US by police. The short story is that it’s a crowd sourced reporting platform.
I was thrilled to find it because I now feel that I have a grip on how widespread this problem is. The bad news is that this problem is way, way, way bigger than I thought.
In summary, it took me many years to become fully aware of this problem. Thanks to The Counted, I feel that I have a good overview. Now I’m ready for action.
I want to be able to use The Counted to hold my local officials to a higher standard. I want to get a report from The Counted, every month, that details how many consecutive days it’s been since the police killed anyone, in my city (Oakland, CA). I also want to get a report emailed to me whenever the police kill someone in my city. I plan on measuring their success by the number of consecutive days they can go without killing someone. This is where I need help from The Counted.
A request of The Counted
If you guys can and or will build this functionality into your site, I promise I will use it to put additional pressure on local officials until they can get the annual number of people killed by police down to near zero. I know this can be done, even in other gun-infested countries, because Canada does it.
Point of clarification: As of today, The Counted only goes down to the state level, you can’t view reports by city. Also, there is no automatic sending of reports of any kind.
In closing, I would like to thank The Counted (by the Guardian) for quickly solving an important problem that our government is years from solving, if ever.
“Thank you!”
The Counted by the Guardian