{"id":9752,"date":"2020-10-14T08:36:56","date_gmt":"2020-10-14T15:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.springboard.com\/?p=9752"},"modified":"2023-07-07T21:34:22","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T04:34:22","slug":"rise-2020-data-science-campaign-zero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.springboard.com\/blog\/news\/rise-2020-data-science-campaign-zero\/","title":{"rendered":"Rise 2024: How Campaign Zero Is Leveraging Data Science for Social Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

Springboard\u2019s annual <\/span>Rise 2020 virtual conference<\/span><\/a> concluded last week with a highly anticipated panel discussion on the role data science can play in leveraging social impact. DeRay McKesson<\/a>, a civil rights activist and one of the leading voices of the Black Lives Matter movement, discussed the work of <\/span>Campaign Zero<\/span><\/a>, an organization he co-founded in 2015 that uses data-driven policy frameworks to end police violence in the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the time of writing, <\/span>police have killed 839 people<\/span><\/a> in the US in 2020 alone\u2014a rate on par with previous years, despite much of the country going under lockdown for several months at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data paints a picture of a systemic problem with no easy solution: Black people are three times as likely to be killed by police as white people, and rates of police violence are <\/span>not<\/span>, in fact, correlated with levels of violent crime. <\/span><\/p>\n

This data matters now more than ever, as legislators and activists in <\/span>at least 13 US cities<\/span><\/a>, including Seattle, Austin, New York, and Los Angeles, are campaigning to defund their police departments and reallocate budgets to alternative forms of public safety. But these aren\u2019t the cities most besieged by police brutality. Current data from MappingPoliceViolence.org<\/a> identifies eight of the 100 largest police departments that kill Black men <\/span>at a higher rate<\/span> than the national homicide rate, including Reno, Oklahoma City, St. Louis City, and Scottsdale. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s wild to us is these aren\u2019t cities you read about in the news, but these are the places where the problem is most acute,\u201d said McKesson during his Rise 2020 session. \u201cAs organizers, if our solutions don\u2019t hit these places, then it doesn\u2019t matter.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Using data to propose better policy solutions<\/b><\/h3>\n

No definitive dataset currently exists that charts <\/span>all<\/span><\/i> instances of police brutality, regardless of whether or not the officer was on-duty and if a weapon was involved. When it comes to using data to illustrate a social injustice, the rules are determined by whoever creates the database, which radically alters the way a problem is framed. <\/span><\/p>\n

For example, <\/span>Fatal Force<\/span><\/a>, a database maintained by <\/span>The Washington Post<\/span>, only includes killings that occurred while an officer was on-duty and in which a gun was involved. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis means that George Floyd is not on that database because he wasn\u2019t killed by a gun,\u201d said McKesson, referencing the high-profile incident in Minneapolis earlier this year where a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on the neck of George Floyd, a Black man, for eight minutes and 46 seconds. Floyd died shortly after.<\/span><\/p>\n

Part of Campaign Zero\u2019s work is to aggregate data from disparate sources and reconstitute it to aid in policy decisions. For example, requiring officers to wear body cameras and undergo implicit bias training have become go-to policy solutions for addressing police violence, but the <\/span>data shows<\/span><\/a> that these measures do little to reduce police misconduct. <\/span><\/p>\n

As for community representation, \u201cthe percentage of Black officers does matter, but not until the department is over 35% Black,\u201d said McKesson, who hosts the social justice podcast, Pod Save the People<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Data on police violence exposes a flawed system <\/b><\/h3>\n

While data has been used extensively to document the problem of police misconduct, it can also be used to examine an underlying justice system that condones the fatal use of force. Campaign Zero reviewed police union contracts in nearly 600 US cities and found that 84% of these contracts imposed at least one barrier to holding police accountable. <\/span><\/p>\n

In addition to creating a public database of police union contracts, McKesson also published the Law Enforcement Officer\u2019s Bill of Rights so the general public could understand the existing provisions that are designed to protect police officers. These include preventing an officer\u2019s name or picture from being publicly released or allowing officers to wait 48 hours or more before being interrogated after an incident. <\/span><\/p>\n

The protections granted by police unions explain why so few police officers who use excessive force on unarmed civilians are convicted of murder, often receiving lesser charges of manslaughter\u2014or, as in the recent fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor, <\/a><\/span>\u201cwanton endangerment.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSome of the data we deal with is numbers and making the case. The other set of data we deal with is helping people understand their policies and how they stack up,\u201d McKesson explained. <\/span>\u201cIt is impossible to get the transformative change people want unless you engage the police union contract.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Using data to understand the state of policing involves so much more than just crunching numbers, says McKesson. \u201cWe are sensitive about understanding data not just as numbers on spreadsheets but people\u2019s stories, their lived reality.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Using predictive analysis to compare outcomes<\/h3>\n

As state and local governments search for data-driven solutions to police violence, there is a greater need for predictive analytics to show the potential outcomes of criminal justice reforms like banning chokeholds, ending broken windows policing, and establishing civilian oversight of police investigations. <\/span>\u201cWe try to help people think about what\u2019s possible in their city by showing them case studies from cities that are similar to their own.” <\/span><\/p>\n

One of Campaign Zero\u2019s upcoming projects is a dashboard that allows cities to compare their outcomes with peer cities of similar political leanings and demographic makeup. Often, progressive cities like New York or Seattle are cast as \u201cmodel\u201d cities in the movement to end police violence, but every locality has its own approach to criminal justice reform informed by its population. <\/span><\/p>\n

McKesson stresses that it\u2019s important to defer to the data, even if the recent explosion of Black Lives Matter protests across the country and public condemnation of police violence suggests things are changing for the better. <\/span>\u201cThe data is important to us\u2014we use it to guide us so we can figure out what the actual wins are because we worry sometimes that people think that the conversation changing is enough,\u201d he said. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe police actually win in a context where talking about the problem differently is synonymous with [solving] the problem.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

For more Rise 2020 coverage, check out our\u00a0tips on transforming your career in a post-pandemic world<\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Springboard\u2019s annual Rise 2020 virtual conference concluded last week with a highly anticipated panel discussion on the role data science can play in leveraging social impact. DeRay McKesson, a civil rights activist and one of the leading voices of the Black Lives Matter movement, discussed the work of Campaign Zero, an organization he co-founded in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":85,"featured_media":9754,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_eb_attr":"","_eb_data_table":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"marketing_tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9752","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.springboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9752"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.springboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.springboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.springboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/85"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.springboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9752"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.springboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47617,"href":"https:\/\/www.springboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9752\/revisions\/47617"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.springboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.springboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.springboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.springboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9752"},{"taxonomy":"marketing_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.springboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/marketing_tags?post=9752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}