Death by Legal Intervention: An Historical Snapshot of Twenty-five Years of Data in Baltimore/D.C.

• In Event: 258 - Section on Human Rights Paper Session. From Seattle to Black Lives Matter: The Changing Landscapes of Human Rights in the United States

Abstract

Eric Garner in New York's Staten Island, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Walter Scott in Summerville, S.C., Freddie Grey in Baltimore—these are the latest citizen to join a macabre roster: the growing list of unarmed black men killed by police, their deaths thrust into the national spotlight, generating scrutiny and outrage. The seeming explosion of such cases around the country prompted me to engage my Fall/Spring 2014 social research methods students at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in a project: examining trends in deadly force incidents that have occurred here in the Baltimore/DC area over the last 25 years (1990 to 2015) by searching The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post news archives for all cases in which a citizen was killed by an on-duty officer. The government collects no time series, detailed data on such cases, and so we attempted to create a localized, historical snapshot of these cases, the trends within which are reported here in this paper.

Authors

• Suzanne R. Goodney Lea, Interactivity Foundation

• Deveraux Christian Smith