Samuel Sinyangwe Profile picture
Feb 4 5 tweets 2 min read
There are more than 2,400 elected prosecutors in America. Keith Ellison is *1 of only 4 prosecutors* who has prosecuted and convicted officers in two separate incidents where police killed someone in the past 9 years.
The 4 prosecutors who’ve convicted officers in two separate police killings are Keith Ellison (MN), Faith Johnson (Dallas), Paul Howard (Atlanta), Steve Kunzweiler (Tulsa). 3 of them are Black despite fewer than 5% of all prosecutors being Black. 2 were elected out of office.
Source: the Mapping Police Violence organization (mappingpoliceviolence.squarespace.com)
Additionally, in one of these cases - the murder of Botham Jean, officer Amber Guyger was charged by DA Faith Johnson but Johnson was defeated in an election during the case, with Guyger getting convicted soon after she left. So you could say it’s only 3 prosecutors out of 2,400.
Even prosecutors *most likely to convict officers* still only convict in a small proportion of overall cases they review. About 4% of police killings across these four prosecutor’s jurisdictions end in officers getting convicted. Almost everywhere else is even lower than that.

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More from @samswey

Feb 5
We just issued a Cease and Desist letter to #CampaignZero over their attempt to plagiarize our Mapping Police Violence platform. They have until next Weds to stop masquerading as Mapping Police Violence and misappropriating our work & site as their own. Here are the facts. (1/x) ImageImageImage
I began building the Mapping Police Violence project in 2014, before I met @deray and before Campaign Zero existed. The first time he found out about my project was in this email on February 4, 2015. Image
Note that We The Protesters (which later became Campaign Zero) first became an organization after filing for incorporation on June 29, 2015. And Campaign Zero didn’t exist until August 21, 2015. There was no actual CZ/WTP organization when MPV was created and launched. ImageImage
Read 12 tweets
Feb 1
🚨After @Nettaaaaaaaa and I called for accountability for #CampaignZero, @deray is trying to forcibly take over the Mapping Police Violence database that I and my team have built for *years* - redirecting it to a COPY he has no capacity to maintain in an act of retaliation. 🚨
Before I even met Deray and before Campaign Zero existed, I began building Mapping Police Violence to give communities data to fight back against police violence. It has since become among the most cited resources in the space. The real site is still here: mappingpoliceviolence.squarespace.com
I never thought his animosity over my leaving CZ would cause him to retaliate like this. The fact that we’ve been working on this database for months *unpaid* while he keeps fundraising $40M+ on our work - and on the movement - is shameful. AND on the first day of BHM!
Read 11 tweets
Jan 25
The simplest explanation for this is that the high-profile murder of civilians by police traumatizes and destabilizes communities, which leads to increases in crime. Police violence periodically generates crime in communities.
This has nothing to do with police “pulling back.” It has to do with police aggression leading to catastrophic results for communities. Population-wide effects of police violence on community health, particularly in Black communities, are well-documented: news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/…
What’s particularly pernicious about the “scholarship” on this issue is that a group of criminologists is advancing a theory that police are *not being aggressive enough* after murdering someone that that causes crime to increase. The exact wrong conclusion to draw from the data.
Read 7 tweets
Jan 21
Mapping Police Violence just released a report finding 2021 was one of the *worst years for deadly police violence on record.* See the report at policeviolencereport.org. Here are some of the key findings from our analysis (1/x)…
In 2021 police killed at least 1,134 people. The majority of these killings began with a mental health crisis, traffic violation, disturbance, other non-violent offense or situation with no crime alleged. Only 1 in 3 cases began with a reported violent crime. (2/x)
Police disproportionately killed Black people and Latinos in 2021 - especially when unarmed. Black people have consistently been killed by police at higher rates - and have been unarmed at higher rates - for as far back as data exists on this issue. (3/x)
Read 11 tweets
Jan 19
A nationwide public initiative process would be a far superior mechanism of governance than the United States Senate.
You’d preserve the Presidency and US House (the more representative institutions) and where those (or the courts) fall short you’d have direct democracy with initiatives to cut through institutional barriers and enact laws (even constitutional amendments with a higher threshold).
Policies broadly supported like addressing economic inequality, etc are unlikely to happen under the existing system because the politicians who get elected are almost exclusively wealthy and refuse broaden access. But they might happen if it were put directly on the ballot.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 16
You can’t name a single thing in Tim Scott’s bill that would’ve made a measurable difference in police violence rates. Not a thing.
Tim Scott’s bill restricts but doesn’t ban chokeholds, which most police agencies already do and that wouldn’t even prevent the fewer than 1% of killings by police that are due to chokeholds.
His bill encourages better data collection but the federal government has already proven inept and unwilling to use their existing authority to collect or share useful data on police violence. Moreover, that data is being collected anyway (see: policescorecard.org)
Read 4 tweets

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