Profiling the Police

USING EYEWITNESS VIDEO AS A SOURCE OF DATA ABOUT POLICE ABUSE

WITNESS partnered with El Grito de Sunset Park – a community organization in Sunset Park, Brooklyn – to find new ways to use eyewitness video and open source data to expose abuses by some NYPD and begin to illustrate how police abuse is part of a larger systemic problem.

This site serves as a use case study for advocates, journalists, legal experts and technologists interested in exploring new forms of storytelling through the analysis and curation of human rights videos.

To get started, learn more about the project, review a sample timeline of officer misconduct or check out our Toolkit to learn about the methodologies and tools we used.

Our “Profiling the Police” project won a 2019 Shorty Awards Audience Honor and was a Finalist in the Social Activism category!

A story about this project…

In September 2014, a group of NYPD officers approaches a family working as street vendors as they were packing up their table in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The officers tell them to leave.
An officer asks Cindy Daza, one of the vendors, how old she is. Her brother Jonathan tells her she doesn't need to answer.
So they start questioning him instead.
Things escalate quickly.
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Several days after the incident, former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton told reporters:

“As best as I could tell looking at that video, it seemed to have been totally unprovoked.”
Jonathan Daza and two of his sisters were charged with resisting arrest, harassment and disorderly conduct.
Jonathan Daza

"I have pain in my entire body. I haven't been able to go back to work and I have a family to feed. I'm trying to provide for them, and I don't know what I'm going to do."

Source: New York Daily News
All charges against Jonathan and his sisters were eventually dropped, which he says was because the video showed what truly happened.

Jonathan Daza, his wife Iris Ariza and his sister Wendy. (Photo: Bruce Cotler, New York Daily News)
One of the abusive officers, Vincent Ciardiello, was suspended for 30 days.

Today he remains on the force and continues to get raises and promotions, despite being named in multiple other civil rights lawsuits.

View his profile
The eyewitness video was published by El Grito de Sunset Park, a community organization in Brooklyn, that collects videos to expose abuses by the NYPD.

Learn more about this incident
This is just one out of hundreds of videos collected by El Grito to keep a record of police abuse in Sunset Park.
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Because of NY Civil Rights Law Section 50-a, there is no public access to police personnel records.

El Grito's footage helps fill this gap by providing data to journalists, lawyers and advocates.
Source: MNN

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Without those records, we don't know how often, where or who is committing abuses like the ones seen in the video.
Is this a pattern of a larger systemic issue?
And who suffers the consequences?
Secret internal files released by BuzzFeed News "reveal that from 2011-2015 at least 319 NYPD employees committed offenses serious enough to merit firing were allowed to keep their jobs and many lied, stole, or assaulted NYPD residents."

Read article
But in the absence of a local or national database about police misconduct, the burden of monitoring and exposing abuses is put on the communities, journalists and lawyers.
Imagine if collectively, we could monitor police misconduct and see just how big this problem is.
This is why WITNESS partnered with El Grito: To create a method to collect video, verify it and organize it to analyze police abuse in the community.

About this project
See our toolkit

And support other communities in establishing their own databases, so we can begin to build bigger and more comprehensive datasets.
See what we learned after reviewing over 300 videos of police misconduct in Sunset Park.

Explore findings
See how you can take action and support efforts calling for greater transparency and accountability.

Take action now!
So we can secure justice for our communities.

Explore below

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