{"id":10,"date":"2026-03-26T16:39:37","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T16:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/NYPoliceViolence\/?page_id=10"},"modified":"2026-04-14T15:02:58","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T15:02:58","slug":"introduction-of-project","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/NYPoliceViolence\/introduction-of-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction of Mapping Police Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The project I’ve chosen to review is Mapping Police Violence<\/a>. Mapping Police Violence tracks police violence throughout the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project Mapping Police Violence is on a website under the same name, Mapping Police Violence<\/a>. But it can also be accessed through on the Campaign Zero website on the campaign page<\/a> under the data project section where there is a box explaining the website and a button to visit the site. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A screenshot from the website<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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An example of the drop down menus that are on the website<\/a>. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Mapping Police Violence is a live tracker and as of right now the latest update was April 3, 2026. But the website goes as far back as 2013.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project currently “attempts to document all police killings whether a firearm is used or not.” <\/a>But there are “data constraints around collecting incidents of police violence that do not result in a death,”<\/a> which means that non-fatal police encounters and violence are not counted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This data is important in general just to bring awareness about the scale of police violence and being able to see that data visually laid out. But Mapping Police Violence is “the most comprehensive database on killings by police<\/a>,” which makes it one of the most important and leading databases when it comes to police violence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

History<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

The project was was created in “late 2014”<\/a> by Samuel Sinyangwe but the website went public in 2015. Originally, the planning team of the project consisted of Samuel Sinyangwe, Johnetta Elzie, and DeRay Mckesson. Samuel Sinyangwe is a “data scientist and politic scientist.”<\/a> Johnetta Elzie is a civil rights activist who was important in documenting the events in Ferguson after Michael Brown’s death. DeRay Mckesson is also a civil rights activist who was also actively documenting the events in Ferguson. All of them in their twenties when this project began. The original goal of the project focused specifically on police violence against black people. The original map was created to because it “bears witness to the black men and women who have been killed at the hands of law enforcement in 2014.”<\/a> But the aim of the project has now widened for all cases of police violence, not just violence committed against black men and women. This change seemed to have happened somewhere near October 19, 2017 as the website counted that “police have killed 964 people in the U.S. this year”<\/a> instead of just the number of black people killed by police violence as it did before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Samuel, Johnetta, and DeRay created the We the Protestors group which Campaign Zero, the group associated now with Mapping Police Violence, was created out of. We the Protestors is a “a left-of-center policing policy organization associated with the Black Lives Matter Movement.”<\/a> Campaign Zero was created by the group alongside Brittany Packnett as a “comprehensive plan to end police violence.”<\/a> While Mapping Police Violence does still show its connection to the Campaign Zero page, it does not have any explicit mention of who created the project, who collaborated on it, or any mention of We The Protestors on the website itself. The main reason for leaving out who created the project seems to be because Sinyangwe left Campaign Zero in 2021 and Campaign Zero allegedly “ripped off the public facing contents”<\/a> of Sinyangwe’s original website Mapping Police Violence website that was on Squarespace. Out of the three original collaborators, currently DeRay Mckesson “serves as Executive Director of Campaign Zero” <\/a>and is the only one who is still associated with Campaign Zero’s version of Mapping Police Violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An image of the planning team description on the website when it was first published. Source<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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A picture of Samuel Sinyangwe. Source<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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A picture of Johnetta Elzie. Source<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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A picture of DeRay Mckesson. Source<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The original version of the project looked very different from how it does now. The old version is the exact same as the current MappingPoliceViolence.us<\/a> website. But the current mappingpoliceviolence.us website only lists Samuel Sinyangwe in the planning team section as the person who “built Mapping Police Violence and the Police Scorecard, and co-founded Campaign Zero.”<\/a> The Mapping Police Violence website only changed to its current interface starting in February 2022, after Sinyangwe’s departure from Campaign Zero. On March 24, 2024 the decision to the copyright infringement court case over Campaign Zero allegedly copying Sinyangwe’s website was published and the court did allow a counterclaim that “there was a more similar or even identical version of the map element”<\/a> on Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence in 2022 before it was eventually modified. As of April 6, 2026, “the parties have reached a settlement in principle in this case.”<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A picture of what Mapping Police Violence looked like in 2015. Source<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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A picture of what kind of visualizations Mapping in Police Violence looked like in 2015. Source<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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An example of what the Mapping Police Violence.us <\/a>website looks like today.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The project I’ve chosen to review is Mapping Police Violence. Mapping Police Violence tracks police violence throughout the United States. The project Mapping Police Violence is on a website under the same name, Mapping Police Violence. But it can also be accessed through on the Campaign Zero website on the campaign page under the data […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-full.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-10","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/NYPoliceViolence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/NYPoliceViolence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/NYPoliceViolence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/NYPoliceViolence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/NYPoliceViolence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/NYPoliceViolence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201,"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/NYPoliceViolence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10\/revisions\/201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/NYPoliceViolence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}