I’m a huge proponent of data journalism, it combines my love for journalism and media and my data-junkie nature. It’s also an extremely powerful way to inform people about things going on around them. Words and pictures do a fantastic job telling a story, but numbers can often drive the point home much more effectively when talking about events of scale.
Today I stumbled across one of the finest examples of data journalism done right. The Counted is an interactive catalog of all the people killed by police in the US this year. This past weekend marked the 1000th death at the hands of police, a huge and hugely heart-breaking milestone, and one I wish we never reached. You can explore every single person that died and read the circumstances of their death as well as more in-depth stories written about the events. One interesting data point is the status of the case, since most officer-involved deaths result in an automatic investigation into what happened to determine the legality of the killing (whether or not it can be considered “justified homicide”). This isn’t filterable, but clicking on an individual card shows the details and whether it’s still under investigation or what the final ruling was.
Highlighting the deaths that happen everyday (3.1 on average as of today) doesn’t change things on it’s own, but making the data freely available can help promote informed conversations on the topic and encourage people to step up and work towards making positive change. In my opinion that’s the most important role data journalism plays, keeping people informed enough and helping to empower them to enact change and improve the world around them when they see problems.
