Access to data about policing has become the subject of increased advocacy and police misconduct data has become increasingly available in the United States, leading to a growing cottage industry that has arisen around collecting, analyzing, and publicizing information about policing. Unfortunately, these efforts are often disconnected from organizing aimed at effecting change by reducing and eliminating police profiling, violence and criminalization. 

In an attempt to address these issues and discuss the potential benefits and harms of collecting and disseminating policing data, WITNESS co-hosted a 4-day online convening in collaboration with the Invisible Institute and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Full Disclosure Project in November 2021.

The event brought together grassroots organizers, advocates, data scientists, journalists, lawyers, advocates and funders. The full report from our convening is now available and aims to share the key principles, tensions and practices that we discussed; help guide ongoing conversations and development of best practices; and inform future project planning and funding decisions. 

Some of the key themes that emerged from our conversations include: 

• The importance of protecting privacy, agency and humanity of people whose experiences of policing are reflected in the data, and offer prevention tools and material support.
• Involve those who are most directly impacted by policing in the data collection, analysis and dissemination process. 
• There is no “objective” data.
• Decisions about which data to collect and how to describe and publicize it are subjective and political.
• Institutions and organizations with greater access to data must commit to making the information available and sharing it with directly impacted communities.

This convening builds off WITNESS projects and collaborations with groups like El Grito and Berkeley Copwatch in which we have co-created resources and guidance to support grassroots organizations in collecting, organizing and analyzing videos and data about the police. In 2018, we also co-hosted a convening in Chicago with the Invisible Institute to cover similar topics. Learn more about this work, the convenings and our partners here.  

Inside the Guide you’ll find in-depth research and examples, practical tips and guidance, case studies and exercises.  And this Q&A blog post with WITNESS’ U.S. Immigration Legal Fellow and author of the Guide, Leila Shifteh, offers more about what the Guide is and who it’s for. 

Download the full guide here. You can also access just the Legal section here, or just the Filming section here. 

And join our Facebook Live conversation to learn more about using video as evidence in immigration legal proceedings on December 8th 2pmEST to hear from Leila Shifteh,  author of the guide,  Michelle Quintero, senior attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services’s New York Immigration Family Unit Project , and Benjamin Prado, long time community filmer with American Friends Service Committee San Diego. For Spanish interpretation you’ll need to register on zoom. 

This resource was a true labor of love, time, and passion for the potential of community filmers and lawyers to better work together in order to support immigrant rights. We extend our deepest gratitude to the following individuals and organizations. The knowledge you shared with us and your feedback have been invaluable: 

Yasmine Chahkar Farhang, Richard Bailey, Genia Blaser, Golnaz Fakhimi, Eva Bitran, Jodi Ziesemer, Andrew Wachtenheim, Yasmin Sokkar Harker, Ellen Pachnanda, Meghan McCarthy, Sarah Deri Oshiro, Mitra Ebadolahi, Liz Kenney, Adriana Piñon, Alexandra Smith, Margaret Garrett, Sarika Saxena, Brooklyn Defender Services, Immigrant Defense Project, the creative brilliance and guidance of the WITNESS U.S. Program team, Palika Makam & Jackie Zammuto, and the tremendous vision of Kelly Matheson of WITNESS, who conceived of the original Video as Evidence guide for the international human rights legal context! It takes a village.

We would also like to thank Brooklyn Defender Services, the American Civil Liberties Union, Media Tank, and Variant Strategies for so generously giving us permission to use beautiful stills from their powerful animated video series, We Have Rights. And Gregory Buissereth for the stunning illustrations.

For over 30 years, Berkeley Copwatch has been filming police misconduct and serving as a hub for people to gain valuable Know Your Rights information and report abuses by law enforcement. As a volunteer-led group that represents a broad range of ages, abilities, LGBTQ folxs, unhoused individuals, students and local organizers, they have been instrumental in  collecting footage and documentation to support legal, advocacy and policy initiatives. Their work has also helped create a rich record of community-led initiatives around issues like gentrification, racism and abusive policing against vulnerable populations like the unhoused community and people living with mental health issues.

Given the challenges of maintaining decades of sensitive footage in an all volunteer-run organization, WITNESS engaged in this collaboration with the objective of identifying ways to streamline their workflows, develop important protocols and policies for users, and strengthen their platforms for collecting, organizing and analyzing data in ways that make the information more useful to individuals, lawyers, journalists and advocates. While the Database is not intended to be put online or made public because of privacy and security issues, it serves as an internal resource for the group, and the information will be used for organizing purposes and shared with trusted sources and community members upon request. 

Already this work has supported Berkeley Copwatch to influence policy discussions of the Berkeley Mental Health Commission by working with various commissioners to show them footage of police use of spit hoods and the police role in mental health emergencies. They also shed light on the misconduct of UC Berkeley Officer Sean Aranas, who abused homeless people for years, by curating footage of many separate incidents of his gross misconduct. He “retired” within two months of the release of their footage and campaign. 

Through our many hours of planning, building, testing, tinkering and practicing, we’ve gained many learnings that we are eager to share with other human rights documentation groups. We’ve made available a Planning Workbook, a FileMaker Pro Template, Data Diagrams, a customizable Data Dictionary and Controlled Vocabulary. Learn more about the project and download the resources here. 

This project builds on our previous human rights database initiative Profiling the Police, a collaboration with El Grito de Sunset Park, and furthers our quest to identify simple, low-cost solutions for human rights defenders working to analyze, share and preserve video for advocacy and evidentiary purposes.

With over 1.5 million people in U.S. state and federal prisons, the U.S. puts more people in prison than any other country in the world. We know these astronomical levels of incarceration disproportionately impact people of color and low-income communities. Besides costing over $80 billion dollars a year to lock people up, mass incarceration has very little to no impact on crime reduction, but instead tears families apart and diminishes their economic stability. 

Through our recent trainings and collaborations with groups like CUNY Law School’s Defenders Clinic, Legal Aid New York and Bard College, we’ve seen the power of video and storytelling in advancing efforts to decrease this devastating prison population. Video creates the opportunity to see someone in their full humanity – their mannerisms, their essence, the parts that tend to get lost in a written statement. Amid a climate of fear mongering and misinformation, this has the power to break down stereotypes about people serving long prison sentences, nurturing empathy and understanding.

We are moved by the individuals who have collaborated with us and motivated by the impact this work has had so far. Learn more about this work and share our new Legal Video Advocacy tips and resources.

DETAILS

Our U.S. program team have been partnering with affected immigrant communities, advocacy groups and allies over the last year and a half. Through our Eyes on ICE program, we provide “know your rights” and video documentation trainings for how to safely and effectively capture details of encounters with ICE and Customs and Border Patrol. The program has provided crucial information and resistance to communities at a time when raids and arrests by the agencies are up significantly across the country.

Al Jazeera spent time with us during a series of trainings in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas earlier this fall and reported on our work with our partners the Equal Voice Network and communities there and throughout the United States.

From “The Listening Post”:

With the president’s ceaseless talking and tweeting about threats like a government shutdown if Democrats refuse to fund his border wall, or that migrant caravan from Honduras, stories about ICE and its sister agency, CBP – Customs and Border Protection – are right up there on the mainstream media’s agenda.

But the role the media play in this particular narrative goes well beyond just covering the story. Over the past year, NGOs and legal advocacy organisations have collaborated with media outlets to track cases of enforcement abuse. And they train communities to use their own media tools to document wrongdoing.

Cases like that of Perla Morales-Luna, Juan Hernandez, or Romulo Avelica Gonzalez are just three examples of thousands that surfaced because they were caught on camera, explains Palika Makam, programme coordinator, WITNESS.

“Eyewitness footage has been so crucial in exposing ICE’s manipulative tactics. Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez was arrested by two ICE agents who were in unmarked vehicles, wearing jackets that only said ‘police’. There’s a reason why they don’t identify themselves, they are trying to use manipulative tactics to get information from immigrants or people who they’ve racially profiled in order to arrest and deport them.”

Watch the full report here:

Since the election of Donald Trump, both immigration enforcement and media coverage of immigration-related issues in the U.S. has risen dramatically. WITNESS is bringing together journalists and grassroots advocates to discuss the impact this coverage has had on immigrant communities and explore ways journalists can amplify the stories of immigrants more safely, ethically and effectively.

This conversation is part of the WITNESS Media Lab’s Eyes on ICE project, an initiative dedicated to supporting directly impacted communities and allies to document abuses against immigrant communities and use video and technology to fight deportations and advocate for immigrant rights.

MODERATOR

• Garry Pierre-Pierre – Founder of The Haitian Times, Founder of CUNY Journalism’s Center for Community and Ethnic Media

PANELISTS

• Rong Xiaoqing – Reporter at Sing Tao Daily
• Palika Makam – U.S. Program Coordinator at WITNESS
• Ginger Thompson – Senior Reporter at ProPublica
• Bruna Bouhid – Senior Communications Manager at United We Dream
• Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) – Network member w/ translator Albert Saint Jean, a BAJI NYC Organizer

Full bios for the participants, location details and the full program can be found on the RSVP page.

WITNESS and El Grito de Sunset Park studied over 300 videos from El Grito’s collection of eyewitness videos depicting police misconduct and abuse spanning a dozen years. Sunset Park is a largely Latinx and Asian neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. Going beyond headline-grabbing instances of police violence, “Profiling the Police” aims to expose the day-to-day pressure, surveillance and harassment that residents in heavily-policed neighborhoods—most often people of color—like Sunset Park face on a regular basis.  

We set out to address specific challenges that El Grito faced in managing and making use of their collection of media. But we knew that these and other challenges are faced by many police accountability groups around the United States and the world. Additional problems we explored: supporting sustainable, community-led archives and preservation of police abuse accounts;  working towards metadata standards that would make it easier for video collections to be compared datasets in advocacy and reporting.

Lastly, civil rights law in New York and other states make it extremely difficult to access police officer personnel records for reports of misconduct or disciplinary action. While the burden of exposing abuse should not disproportionally rest on communities directly affected by it, collections like those held by El Grito are an important part of bringing greater transparency around misconduct. 

“Profiling the Police” would not have been possible without the support of our advisors which include:

• Benetech
• Berkeley Copwatch
• Digital Verification Corps.
• Dignity and Power Now!
• El Grito de Sunset Park
• Engine Room
• Human Rights Analysis Group (HRDAG)
• HURIDOCS
• Interference Archive
• Invisible Institute
• Karen Stevenson, Metropolitan Interactive
• Legal Aid Society
• Lucy Parsons Labs
• Open Police Complaints
• Robin Koning, Archivist
• Robin Margolis, Audiovisual Archivist
• Security Force Monitor
• Syrian Archive

For more on the project, click here.

The article, “A Step by Step Guide to Filming an Injustice as a Bystander,” is part of the cover story feature “What Would You Stand Up For?” and highlights our guidance and resources on safe and ethical filming and provides insight on how to use the technology at our fingertips for human rights change and justice.

“Recording human rights abuses on video has the power to counter misleading narratives, spark investigations, and mobilize people. Video can even be used as evidence in court to secure justice for victims,” our U.S. Program Manager, Jackie Zammuto told the magazine.

The article dives into all the things one should account for before filming and sharing. To read the full article, click here.

Many people know us as a partner and force for change around the world. On November 9, we’ll focus our attention on the work we’re doing across the United States to provide guidance to immigrant communities and their advocates around filming ICE raids and agent activity; create and distribute tips for filming and safely sharing documentation of acts of hate like those committed in Charlottesville and ongoing attacks on members of the transgender community; partner with cop watching groups on a prototype database that better organizes citizen footage of police misconduct, increasing the possibility of accountability and justice; and address the spread of “fake news” through innovative tools like ProofMode, and continued pressure and collaboration with tech companies to develop better platform policies to curb the spread of misinformation.

At this critical moment in the U.S., you can help put powerful stories to work for human rights. Come together with WITNESS on November 9 to learn how!

Ready to buy tickets? Click here.