UCLA KI team member, Irene Pasquetto, was a presenter at the UCLA Information Studies Colloquium on Thursday January 14th. Pasquetto and her colleagues presented their work analyzing the availability and usability Police Officer-Involved Homicides data in Los Angeles. Their project abstract is below and more information about the project can be found at: http://www.poihomicides.org/

 

Police Officer-Involved Homicide Project, January 2016

Police Officer-Involved Homicide Project, UCLA Information Studies Presentation, January 2016

 

This multifaceted project investigates police officer-involved homicide (POIH) data as a mechanism for fostering civic data literacy, accountability and political action that challenges existing policies. To do this, we conducted a hackathon as a component of participatory action research, as we draw from the field of statactivism to reason that through acts of statistical reappropriation and intervention, data can provide a means of wresting control of the power of certain ‘authoritative’ metrics by challenging them or devising new ones. As an extension of critique, counter data efforts confront official indicators by illuminating the consequences of resulting policies or proposing alternative collection methods, definitions, and values not taken into account by these measures. From such a vantage, we interrogate how a life taken becomes rationalized and processed as a data point, and how the lived experience of a community’s loss becomes a statistic with explanatory power.