How White House Policing Initiatives Empower Community Activism

The White House to you
Sunday, October 16, 2016

The White House

When we are brave enough to acknowledge our greatest challenges, we can solve our biggest problems and move toward a brighter future, together. Yesterday, President Obama participated in The White House Frontiers Conference to discuss how innovation and technology can help solve our greatest social problems. For the past two years, community members, activists, and organizers have been doing exactly that, pushing for social justice and urgent police reforms across the country.  This movement has been shining a light on one of our greatest challenges, and in turn, has been busy working toward numerous policy changes and legislative actions. Since the beginning, activists everywhere, from Ferguson to Cleveland, as well as researchers, scholars, and law enforcement practitioners, have identified transparent and thorough data as part of this process. The lack of trust many of our communities have in systems of law enforcement cannot be ignored–and stronger data, no matter how revealing, will be essential to us correcting course and solving this issue. Data that reflects the reality of all our communities - especially those disproportionately affected by these issues - legitimizes our stories and our existence, as well as enables our collective pathway forward to find solutions together with our institutions.

While there still remains great progress to be made, open data projects from the White House have set us on a more transparent, clear path. We cannot solve problems we do not name, and the White House Police Data (PDI) and Data Driven Justice (DDJ) Initiatives have helped us name the challenges and accurately assess their scale for the past year. In that time alone, important progress has been made: More than simple commitments, local police departments have already taken actions to address the findings, pushing us forward in progress.

Working directly with police departments to collect the most critical statistics on community interactions, the Police Data Initiative has partners in 129 jurisdictions so far and reaches over 44 million Americans. The Data Driven Justice Initiative has partnered with 120 and counting jurisdictions and reaches 91 million Americans. These initiatives match the effort made by activists and journalists alike to track more things that matter to our neighborhoods–and provide a level of federal support that increases our ability to ensure the fullness of our story is told.

Across the nation, activists, journalists, concerned community members, and forward thinking leaders will continue to strive for greater accountability, transparency, and safety in our neighborhoods. As we press forward together, we know that these efforts to increase the use of data will be critical levers in healing our collective wounds, solving our greatest challenges, and reaching the more inclusive future for which we strive.

Brittany Packnett
Co-Founder, Campaign Zero
Member, President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing

E-mail of me :p.tiendat@yahoo.com
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