Guest speaker works to end police violence through data collection

Samuel Sinyangwe, who specializes in collecting data addressing the issue of police violence in vulnerable populations, presented some of his statistical work and solutions to Chapman students in a Zoom webinar March 2. Photo from Chapman University

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin will stand trial March 8, facing charges for third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter of the late Minnesota resident George Floyd. A video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck May 25, 2020 went viral, sparking a revitalization of the Black Lives Matter movement and a broader conversation about police brutality.

Nonprofit organizations such as Campaign Zero are using statistical data from national databases, including Mapping Police Violence, to determine and overcome the root causes behind the 98.3% of officers not being charged for killing an individual between 2013 and 2020. Samuel Sinyangwe, a co-founder of both organizations, hosted a March 2 webinar called “Using Data to End Police Violence” as part of Chapman’s spring 2021 Grand Challenges Initiative speaker series.

After Michael Brown was killed in August 2014 and subsequent protests erupted, Sinyangwe said he noticed the federal government’s database did not accurately reflect how many people were killed in a given year.

“The Department of Justice was relying on 18,000 different police departments across the country to all record data in a consistent and reliable way every single year,” Sinyangwe said at the event. “When you actually look at what was happening, huge proportions of states were just going unreported.”

The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health released a 2017 statement that revealed deaths caused by officers were being undercounted in many states. Just a few years prior, Florida was named in 2014 as just one of several states in which the FBI did not have any data on the number of officer-involved shootings.

According to Mapping Police Violence, California has at least 700 combined police killings of Black and Hispanic individuals. Upon launching Campaign Zero and Mapping Police Violence in 2015, Sinyangwe noticed that policy makers and researchers were more reluctant to believe the reports of police violence, as they were only hearing stories and not seeing the data.

“They would ask, ‘Where’s the data to prove that this is really widespread? Where’s the data to prove that systemic racism is real? Where’s the data to prove that these solutions can work?’” Sinyangwe said. “Those are the questions that we needed to figure out how to use data to address — to sort of grease the wheels and move policy.”

Sinyangwe also explained that there were around 1,100 people killed each year by police officers from 2013 to 2020. He noted that while large cities are not seeing as much police violence between 2014 and 2018, there has been an increase in the suburban and rural areas.

“It didn’t start in 2013 (or) 2014; it has been a steady rate year over year,” Sinyangwe said. “When we break this down by day, there were only 18 days in 2020 in which the police didn’t kill anybody. On average, there are between three and four people killed by police every single day.”

Sinyangwe spoke on two of the 10 possible suggestions that Campaign Zero feels police departments could adopt nationwide. One proposes revising the departments’ policies on using force, as they vary for each department. To get an idea of this, the organization created a scrollable graphic, featuring city names and use of force policy categories such as “requires de-escalation” and “requires warning before shooting.”

“When we looked at the data, it turns out that the agencies that adopted more of these restrictions had lower rates of police violence, both per population basis and per arrest,” Sinyangwe said. “Not only that, but the officers were safer in these jurisdictions as well.”

Another suggestion focuses on not allowing police union contracts to negotiate on disciplinary policies, something that also appears in the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights. Campaign Zero looked at contracts in approximately 600 cities nationwide, noticing that the unions were bargaining with the cities.

While Sinyangwe said that the unions’ contracts may sound “obscure,” he believes that they are important in ending police violence and helping with accountability. According to Mapping Police Violence, only 1.7% of killings by police since 2013 have resulted in an officer charged with a crime.

“We did a deep-dive investigation of police union contracts across the country,” Sinyangwe said. “Essentially (this is) a set of rules that only the police get — that nobody else gets — that protects them from being held accountable.”

Gregory Goldsmith, the director of the Grand Challenges Initiative, said he hoped that science and engineering students would be able to learn from those like Sinyangwe in humanities work and not perceive these fields as incompatible.

“The Grand Challenges Initiative is about empowering our students to solve really hard problems, and at the core of the work that Sinyangwe is doing is a really hard problem that has to do with structural racism,” Goldsmith said.

Near the end of his presentation, Sinyangwe explained how the collected data would play a role in finding solutions to end police violence in the United States and encourage law enforcement accountability.

“It’s one thing to just have this data out there and to talk about this issue,” Sinyangwe said. “It’s another thing to actively use data as a way to not only inform people, but to empower people to change those outcomes.”