There's no comprehensive database of police killings in the US, so a group of volunteers is making one
- The volunteer-run database EBWiki has tracked police violence against Black Americans since 2015.
- Its mission, said co-founder Darius Goore, is to agitate for change by educating the public about police killings.
- "The more information we have about these cases, the more people are talking about them, the better our chances of actually getting the reforms we need," Goore said.
Little is known about the death of Yvonne McNeil outside a homeless shelter in 2011.
McNeil, a trans woman, was shot dead by two New York Police Department officers after reportedly refusing to drop two small knives. The New York Daily News, citing police sources, reported that McNeil charged at the two officers, who shot her five times.
As with thousands of other Black Americans killed by police, the details of her death are murky, incomplete, and informed primarily by statements from the police. The name of the officers who killed McNeil were never released. Three people who knew McNeil from the now-defunct Queers for Economic Justice, an organization she was active in, told Insider they didn't know whether the NYPD even investigated the killing.
The same story has played out thousands of times. They are visible, in large part, because regular, everyday citizens track them themselves. Through police violence databases like End Bias Wiki, or EBWiki, people document police violence in order to stop it.
There is no official database for American police killings, making the task of tracking them all the more pressing, EBWiki co-founder Darius Goore said.
"We can shine light on these cases as they go forward," Goore told Insider. "The more information we have about these cases, the more people are talking about them, the better our chances of actually getting the reforms we need."
There's no comprehensive database of police killings
Goore began the project with colleagues in 2015, shortly after Walter Scott, a Black man, was shot and killed by police during a traffic stop, spurring national outrage.
The officer said he shot Scott in self-defense. But like numerous other police killings, that narrative was proven false by video footage, which showed him shooting Scott in the back eight times as he ran away.
"That was the last straw," Goore told Insider. "We had to do something."
EBWiki seeks to remind the public that police forces kill Black Americans every day, Goore said.
"There's a life cycle for these cases," he said. "There have been a number of cases where there have been significant protests. And then, after a while, it's hard to maintain the kind of outrage required for fundamental change to happen."
It is effectively impossible to compile a comprehensive database of police killings. McNeil's killing, for example, is not listed on EBWiki's website, though it is on a similar database from the organization Invisible No More. That's driven, in part, by a lack of government oversight.
"The information and data that we largely have is due to what's been reported from news agencies," Kristina Roth, a researcher at Amnesty International, told Insider, "or organizations like Mapping Police Violence."
'The best way that we can honor them is not to forget them'
Even without a full picture of police killings, EBWiki, which is run by volunteers, is contributing to the movement for Black lives in the United States and around the world.
"Recently," Goore said, "we have gotten the interest from organizations that want to work with us. We had originally thought about this as being a site focused on America, but we've had interest from people countries in Europe and other places saying, 'We have the same issue.'"
"We have a guy in Australia who's added literally a thousand cases to the site," he added.
EBWiki's three founders — Goore and developers Rachel Green and Mark Nyon — all work full-time jobs. But their efforts to scale up the database have been met with enthusiastic support, interest, and donations. Fifty-four volunteers have contributed to the project, either conducting research from news reports or building out the backend of the website.
As with other wiki projects, like Wikipedia, anyone can sign up to make edits, which means that entries aren't separately fact-checked, but every entry also includes sources readers can check for verification. The site's grassroots success is in object lesson in the "democratization" of information, Goore said, "not just [with] people contributing, but also people receiving."
EBWiki is "making it so that the average person, who is not a full-time protester or a full-time reformer, who doesn't necessarily have the emotional capacity to follow all these cases that are so brutal, can follow a case so they can keep up with what's going on," he said. And by informing the public about police violence, EBWiki is honoring the Black lives lost to it.
"The best way that we can honor them," Goore said, "is not to forget them."
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