Profiling The Police: Using Eyewitness Video as a Source of Data About Police Abuse
Advances in technology have made it possible for more people than ever before to film and expose human rights abuses. This increase in eyewitnesses video presents new opportunities and challenges around how footage is analyzed, shared, preserved and used for advocacy and evidentiary purposes.
To explore these possibilities and perils at a hyperlocal level, WITNESS and El Grito de Sunset Park partnered to collect, analyze and preserve over a decade of eyewitness videos of police abuse from Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
Together we developed and documented accessible ways to manage large collections of videos and explored new ways to tell the story of systemic police abuse and impunity.
El Grito is an organization formed as a response from the socially and economically
disenfranchised to systems of oppression. El Grito is a volunteer run community
organization based in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. We coordinate public forums, speak outs,
advocacy campaigns, emergency relief, and educational programs that engage the
community to address social, civil rights, and public policy concerns. We seek to
help find solutions to long-standing socio-economic problems.
El Grito also collaborates with groups working to end “zero tolerance policing”
in New York City.
Inspired by many Gritos (translates to “outcry” in English) and their history of resistance,
El Grito provides a platform on which to express and document the experiences of
marginalized communities by encouraging civic engagement to protect human rights.