What is in a death?: An exploration of deaths through interactions with U.S. law enforcement
by Tauheeda Yasin/Cultural Studies, George Mason University
Death’s Aftermath
The scenes of faces obscured by smoke, masks, and gear midst the hum of helicopters and nondescript chanting filled American television screens in the late summer of 2014.
The cable news outlets called it chaos. Media outlets flocked to Ferguson. Talking heads appeared with the scenes of smoke, voices, and artillery acting as backdrops to voice overs in alarmed and panicked tones; they attempted descriptions of the unrest that had filled the streets of Ferguson, Missouri.
[Taken from: Underground World News on Youtube; Published 8/20/2014]
The unrest centered on the events of the death of Michael Orlandus Darrion Brown, son of Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr., aged 18, shot dead on August 9, 2014.
As voices and people appeared on the streets, growing unrest and anger that the death had occurred gained momentum throughout the country.
The city of Ferguson, Missouri took notice. The state of Missouri took notice. The United States took notice. The internet took notice. The world took notice. ———
What was it about the death of Michael Darrius Orlandon Brown Jr. that captured so much attention?
As news of unrest in Ferguson grew, and protests in solidarity sprung up in cities throughout the U.S. and even abroad, the national conversation attempted to understand the cause for the unrest. Why were people protesting? Why was there so much anger? What will this anger do?
The collective sense of injustice at the hands of law enforcement was at the center of unrest. Michael Orlandus Darrion Brown’s death unfolded in such a way that the dysfunction that is race in the U.S. was spoken - exploding in the familiar “American grammar” (to use Hortense Spillers), a grammar that was familiar and unmistakable to many as a “fleshy” rendering of a body, Michael Brown’s, and therefore everyBODY just like his as not human.
As Spillers writes in her landmark piece, “Mamas Baby and Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”:
“The captive body, then, brings into focus a gathering of social realities as well as a metaphor for value so throughly interwoven in their literal and figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless. Even though the captive flesh/body has been”liberated," and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamic of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topic, shows movement, as the human subject is “murdered” over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise… And I would it call it the Great Long National Shame… We write and think, then, about an outcome of aspects of African-American life in the United States under the pressure of those events." (68)<
This American grammar, then, for Spillers, is the Great Long National Shame of slavery that has left the indelible mark of a “symbolic order”, which is never forgotten, always present. So that even while slavery has ended and by all accounts of the official narrative on race in the U.S., we’ve now entered into a post-racial period; I mean, it is obvious to many that this has to be the case because the U.S. has a black president.
Nonetheless, why then, did Michael Brown’s death permeate within this vein of a history never forgotten, always permeating – a history of the marking of bodies within this social order into bare flesh.
Michael Brown’s death was a reminder, a spoken, even shouted reminder that black lives don’t matter. This was the reading of his death because his body didn’t matter – not to the Ferguson City Police Department nor did it matter to Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Darrion Orlandus Brown Jr.
There was a photograph that appeared on Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter accounts in the hours and days following his death. It was a photograph of Michael Orlandus Darrion Brown Jr.’s body laying the street. Variations on the captions underneath related the story of how he had been shot by a police officer and his body had remained in the street for four hours.
To many, Michael Orlandus Darrion Brown’s body, shared, broadcasted, and discussed defined the American grammar of nonhuman distinction. “Four hours”" was the refrain. “Hands up, don’t shoot” was the refrain. His death demonstrated to many the lack of access to a human distinction for black bodies. The image of his body, face down, pants falling just below his waist, underwear exposed, a trail of blood flowing from his head, his baseball cap lying next to him - his dark, black, body exposed, uncared for, gazed upon and undeserving.
Not even a dog would be left out in the street. Dead. … for four hours. Dylann Roof shot nine black people worshiping in a church. Confessed. The police brought him Burger King because he was hungry.
Michael Brown’s stepfather was photographed holding a sign that read, “Ferguson Police Just Executed My Unarmed Son!!”
Then, the news outlets began to eat more of Michael Darrion Orlando Brown Jr.’s flesh. The justifications for his death came in through the details of his apparent thuggery. He deserved death. He stole. This was evidenced through the convolution of detail as to why Officer Darren Wilson shot him.
In his testimony, Wilson said, And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan… I mean it was, he’s obviously bigger than I was and stronger, and I’ve already taken two to the face and I didn’t think I would, the third one could be fatal if he hit me right. I then looked at him, and I told him to get back, and he was just staring at me, almost like to intimidate me or to overpower me. The intense face he had was just not what I expected from any of this… He looked up at me, and had the most intense, aggressive face. The only way I can describe it – it looks like a demon. That’s how angry he looked.”<
Recalling familiar racializing assemblages that render black bodies inhuman, Warren’s testimony is textbook American grammar. As Alexander Weheliye writes, in Habeas Viscus, “the legal and extralegal fictions of skin color and other visual markers obscure, and therefore facilitate, the continued existence and intergenerational transmission of the hieroglyphics of the flesh. Spillers adds to and recasts the concept of bare life by forcefully showing how, within the context of racial slavery, it gives birth to a cluster of classifying assemblages that stands at the center of modernity”(50).
Demon. Hulk Hogan. Bigger, stronger, aggressive, intense, intimidate, overpower – all used in familiar ways to render black bodies different.
As Weheliye writes, “Spiller’s theorization of the flesh highlights one significant instance of this biocultural stigmatic apparatus in which ideas are literally and figuratively deformed into racialized assemblages of human flesh that invents human phenomenology with an aura of extrahuman physiology. The hieroglyphics of the flesh still dwell among us in the fissures of our current governing configuration of the human as Man; they are the ether that animates racializing assemblages, the ether that broadcasts slashes onto the scar tissue of succeeding generations” (51).
In short, Michael Brown could not escape his black body. He was a successor to the generations before that also bore the brunt of assemblages that rendered their bodies, black, large, fleshy, scary “others”. Perhaps Brown did charge at Officer Darren Wilson. Perhaps he was a “demon” out to kill Wilson. Perhaps he was the Hulk. Perhaps Michael Brown deserved to die is the logical conclusion to be drawn from the renderings on his body. He deserved it. He was not deserving of sympathy, empathy, pity, or humanity. Let him lie in the street is what is being said. The familiar grammar that spoken before rendered thousands of other black bodies to the terror of lynching - because they too deserved it. The hieroglyphics of the flesh continues.
The media continued the narrative in the form of details about Michael Brown’s life and pictures. Michael Brown was 6 feet 4 inches and 289 pounds. Michael Brown graduated from an “alternative” high school, just 8 days earlier. Michael Brown made rap music.
In a convolution of details and backtracking, the Ferguson Police Department responded to the unrest. As MSNBC reported, “The initial contact with Mike Brown was not related to the robbery,” Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson said. Brown had been stopped “because he was walking down the street blocking traffic, that’s it,” he added.
Then that afternoon, in an interview with the St. Louis-Post Dispatch, Jackson backtracked, telling the newspaper that Wilson “saw cigars in Brown’s hand and realized he might be the robber.”
Jackson’s admission that Wilson didn’t stop Brown in connection with the alleged robbery raises the question about why the video and the report were released in the first place. Jackson said he released the video because “you asked for it,” referring to the media. But police refused to disclose Wilson’s name for days, and have still not released the incident report related to Brown’s shooting or his autopsy – both requested by the media" (this was reported on August 15, 2014).
“An attorney for Dorian Johnson, who allegedly witnessed Wilson shooting Brown, acknowledged that Brown had taken cigars from the store. Police have said that Brown was shot after trying to grab Wilson’s weapon. Johnson and another witness, Tiffany Mitchell, have said that Brown was trying to run away from Wilson when he was gunned down.
The decision to release the video and a police report describing the robbery – but little related to the actual shooting – has fueled more questions about whether the police are retroactively trying to justify Brown’s death."
“During the press conference, an attendee shouted out, “seems like you’re only answering questions that demean the character of Mike Brown.” Earlier Friday, Brown’s family released a statement saying they were “outraged at the devious way the police chief has chosen to disseminate piecemeal information in a manner intended to assassinate the character of their son.” (MSNBC 2014)
In Lisa Mari Cacho’s piece, “‘You Just Don’t Know How Much He Meant: Deviancy, Death, and Devaluation”, she explores the death of her cousin, Brandon Jesse Martinez, a young Latino man from California who died in a car crash in the year 2000. In her attempt to mourn and find space for meaning in his death, she is confronted with the conundrum of the lack of worth ascribed to the lives of those like her cousin, Brandon. She writes,
“He did not leave us with any evidence to narrate him as a productive, worthy, and responsible citizen, who had been ‘‘unfairly’’ treated, ‘‘unjustly’’ targeted, and ‘‘wrongfully’’ accused. But precisely because he could not be convincingly scripted out of his ascribed deviance, the scripts about his death and life are important sites within which to examine the intersecting, racialized, and gendered discourses of deviancy and respectable domesticity that attribute and deny human value. By reexamining deviance, repudiating respectability, and rethinking resistance, we can employ what Chela Sandoval (2000, 139–178) calls a ‘‘hermeneutics of love,’’ a method that requires us to be overcome and transformed by the unfamiliar in what we already know, so that we are brave enough to drive down dangerous roads to places we have never wanted or always hoped to go. Such spaces disrupt racialized, gendered, and sexualized disciplining, offering us alternative ways of knowing to reconceptualize systems of value, measures of worth, and standards of living, dying, and desiring. This is where ‘‘deviants’’ do not need to be redeemed” (184).
Because of the lack of worth ascribed to those like Michael Brown and Brandon Martinez, there was an attempt by Brandon’s friends as well as Michael Brown’s friends to counter the media’s narrative of worthlessness and his deserving of death. Counter narratives of a “gentle giant” appeared in the news against the backdrop of photos taken by the media from his social media accounts with his middle finger raised. His mother spoke. Michael made her laugh. He was swet. This prompted another hashtag campaign where social media users attempted to reframe the conversation by posting pictures of themselves with the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDowned with side-by-side photos of themselves displaying seemingly contrasting behavior. A black man in a soldier’s uniform displayed next to a photo of him holding a gun with a scarf wrapped over the lower half of his face.
The attempts to draw attention to the racializing assemblages marks an intervention into dominant narratives of personhood(or lack of it).
Fatal Encounters: An Attempt to Name
Another attempt to read meaning and highlight the ongoing need for fissures in the American grammar book of racial dysfunction is the Fatal Encounters website maintained by California State at Fullerton. Michael Brown’s death along with numerous others who made headlines and fueled the movement for #blacklivesmatter have highlighted the ongoing problem of lethal police interactions.
The U.S. currently does not maintain precise numbers on the number of people who die in police interactions. There is no official body that tracks the number of civilians killed at the hands of police officers in the U.S. The F.B.I. does not keep track of the number of civilians. This task is left to law enforcement agencies to report on the number of people who die while in custody or in interactions with police.
Data offers us points of possible intervention. Data cannot and will not tell the entire story, but it does hold currency within dominant narratives and thus affords the opportunity to engage in other ways. Sarah Deer in The Beginning and End of Rape in Native America, challenges the notion and use of data by pointing out the ability of data to direct focus to problems and prompt action, but the limits of data to speak in a multitude of ways and in fact the opportunity data has to obscure.
Michel Foucault’s theory on biopower does offer some possibilities for conceptualizing the role of death and state racism/technologies that render some worthy of intervention to “live”, when viewing state policies as the engagement in state racism in allocation of resources. Within this framework, Michael Brown and others like he and Brandon Martinez represent a class not chosen for allocation of resources, surplus, if you will. This is especially evident in the poverty demographics in Ferguson and the clear allocation of resources to the labor of policing, which is a point that could be developed at a later point.
In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault discusses the power of state technologies to “live and let die” (247), and the use of data/statistics for biopolitical measures in population control. Interestingly, Foucault theorizes that death can be a mechanism for state intervention but that ultimately Power has no control over death, but it can control mortality” (248). So the domain that can be examined here is the rate of mortality and what it can illuminate about state policies in the vein of “let die” or in this case directly kill.
I am interested in the Fatal Encounters data because it offers names. It offers descriptions and pictures of those taken. It creates a space for an official rendering and description of the lives taken. Oddly, while data has the power to obscure – obscure lives lived, harm done, lives that mattered; it also has the power to illuminate, and in the naming and counting, we can begin a story of meaning in life.
Using the Fatal Encounters data, I first embarked on an exploration of what the data can tell us about the bodies not recognized, not counted in the form of state statistics on death. A few questions I have about the lack “official” data is how to conceptualize this lack within the role of technologies in state and local governments used in the service of extraction of resources, labor, money in order to self-fund itself. This is a point I hope to explore more at a later point. Space doesn’t permit me to do so here.
Because my first inquiry into data was Michael Brown in Ferguson, I first decided to do some double-checking on the statistics surrounding Ferguson and the context of Michael Brown’s death in terms of his interaction with law enforcement. For this, I needed to look at both U.S. Census data as well as data derived from the Encounters site.
Ferguson, Missouri and Police Interaction
I first looked at Census Data. I downloaded geographical data from 2014 census data available on race, age, and gender in Ferguson, Missouri. I discovered that in 2014, in a city of over 21,000 people, close to 14,000 people in Ferguson were black or 66 percent of the population.
Of that 14,000, close to 4,000 blacks had been stopped by police in 2014, or close to one third. I found this data by researching and finding a racial profiling report that was developed in the aftermath of the Ferguson protests and the U.S. Justice Department investigation and report. In contrast to the black population, the white population of Ferguson, Missouri is made up of about 6,600 people or 31 percent of the City’s population. 12 percent of whites in Ferguson had been stopped according to Missouri state 2014 racial profiling data.
## Source: local data frame [6 x 2]
##
## race population
## (chr) (int)
## 1 white 6632
## 2 black 13906
## 3 indian 30
## 4 asian 37
## 5 other_race 44
## 6 two_or_more_races 502
What this demonstrates for me is that the likelihood that Michael Brown would have some interaction with the police was higher because of his skin rather than if he had been white. The state of Missouri also documented whether or not there were racial disparities in the number of stops by police officers according to race.
The disparity index looked at the proportion of stops divided by the proportion of the population. The state determined that a value of 1 represents no disparity; values greater than 1 indicate over-representation while values less than one indicate under representation. According to the State of Missouri, in Ferguson, City, blacks were over represented by stops while whites were under represented.
## Source: local data frame [1 x 7]
##
## key_indicators black white american_indian asian other hispanic
## (chr) (dbl) (dbl) (dbl) (dbl) (dbl) (dbl)
## 1 disparity_index 1.3 0.49 0.18 0.58 0.48 0.22Data can point to potential forms of understanding demographics adds a layer to our understanding of Brown’s death. As a black male, the likelihood of Michael Brown being stopped was high. Also, because of his age, the likelihood of being stopped by police was high.
The Fatal Encounters database has been tracking the number of civilian deaths at the hands of government agencies, including police departments and the federal government since 2000. The data tracks deaths, mostly at the hands of police. The data, maintained by the University of California, Fullerton has data on deaths reported by official researched, crowd sourced data, and data obtained through information requests. Many of the states have completed forms of data going back to the year 2000. The database also describes the events surrounding deaths and offers some information on the general background of the individuals.
These deaths might provide insight into just how many people die at the hands of police and other law enforcement: a figure not necessarily tracked by official channels. As the site states, it was founded on the premise that, “Americans should have the ability to track that act [deaths due to deadly force]”.
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal in its series Deadly Force, “The nation’s leading law enforcement agency [FBI] collects vast amounts of information on crime nationwide, but missing from this clearinghouse are statistics on where, how often, and under what circumstances police use deadly force. In fact, no one anywhere comprehensively tracks the most significant act police can do in the line of duty: take a life,” (Nov. 28, 2011).
By looking for patterns in the data in terms of the manner of death, location, and certain other factors related to age and ethnicity, we might be able to gleam possible patterns and possible means of intervention.
This paper only looks at a few of the factors that possibly influence as well as providing some possible conceptualizations of in a historical and social reading.
The overall aim of police and law enforcement is to protect and serve communities. When people die while in custody or while in interaction with law enforcement, we would hope that these instances would be rare and unavoidable in the sense that the overarching duty of the police is not to harm, but to protect. What the data can tell is primarily points of interest that would require further study.
The State of Missouri in the Fatal Encounters data.
Looking at the data, I discovered that there was 1 person who died in Ferguson, Missouri in the Fatal Encounters data. I did this by finding the zip code for Ferguson (63135), and determining how many deaths were in that location in the data.
## Source: local data frame [3 x 3]
## Groups: location_of_death_zip_code == "63135" [?]
##
## location_of_death_zip_code == "63135" is.na n
## (lgl) (lgl) (int)
## 1 FALSE TRUE 12277
## 2 TRUE TRUE 1
## 3 NA TRUE 81Because the data is incomplete, I also looked for the city and state of Ferguson, Missouri. In this case, I found that there were two cases.
## Source: local data frame [5 x 4]
## Groups: location_of_death_city == "ferguson", is.na [?]
##
## location_of_death_city == "ferguson" is.na
## (lgl) (lgl)
## 1 FALSE TRUE
## 2 FALSE TRUE
## 3 TRUE TRUE
## 4 NA TRUE
## 5 NA TRUE
## Variables not shown: location_of_death_state == "mo" (lgl), n (int)I wanted to know their names.
## Source: local data frame [2 x 7]
##
## location_of_death_zip_code subjects_race subjects_name
## (chr) (chr) (chr)
## 1 63135 race_unspecified jason_moore
## 2 63136 african-american_black michael_brown
## Variables not shown: subjects_gender (chr), agency_responsible_for_death
## (chr), cause_of_death (chr), symptoms_of_mental_illness (chr)With this exploration, I found two names. James Moore and Michael Brown.
Further Exploration: Fatal Encounters
I first wanted to determine what the main causes of death were in the database. I found that there were in fact 15 documented causes of death, with three: undetermined, other, and NA perhaps having some overlap.
## [1] "gunshot"
## [2] "vehicle"
## [3] "undetermined"
## [4] "tasered"
## [5] "drowned"
## [6] "stabbed"
## [7] "medical_emergency"
## [8] "fell_from_a_height"
## [9] "asphyxiated_restrained"
## [10] "beaten_bludgeoned_with_instrument"
## [11] "burned_smoke_inhalation"
## [12] "drug_overdose"
## [13] "chemical_agent_pepper_spray"
## [14] "other"
## [15] NABy far, the largest cause of death in the database is due to gunshot with close to 10,000 cases in the database compared to over 100 dying from asphyxiation while restrained and close to 120 being bludgeoned with an instrument.
I next looked at race as a factor. I found nine variables.
“race_unspecified” “european-american_white” “african-american_black” “pacific_islander” “native_american_alaskan” “hispanic_latino”
“asian” “middle_eastern” NA
There were no designations for mixed-race individuals.
## [1] "race_unspecified" "european-american_white"
## [3] "african-american_black" "pacific_islander"
## [5] "native_american_alaskan" "hispanic_latino"
## [7] "asian" "middle_eastern"
## [9] NAI next looked at the counts for the total deaths for races in each category.
In a large majority of the cases, race was not specified: 4,925 cases to be exact. The largest number of deaths were reported to be European-Americans at 3,201.
African-Americans were the second largest group at 2,340, and the third largest group was Hispanics at 1,565.
Because such a large number have race unspecified, I don’t believe the data to be an accurate or largely reliable source for determining a racializing component.
Next, I wanted to determine if there was a gender component. There were 5 designations for gender. I found that the large majority of the deaths were men.
Women came in second. There were also three transgender individuals noted. The remaining (14) were either unknown or NA.
I then looked to see if there were specific states that had a large number of deaths in a particular state.
I found the top three states were California, Florida, and Texas. California had listed the largest number of deaths at 2,771.
I decided to look further to determine if there was a particular location in California that was home to a large number of deaths.
I found that Los Angeles was listed with the highest number of deaths at 296. Houston, Texas came in second with 239.
Phoenix, Arizona came in third with 158, and Chicago, Illinois a close fourth with 148, and Las Vegas at 143 people.
I then decided to see if there was a particular agency in California, or more specifically Los Angeles that was involved in the deaths.
In fact, the Los Angeles Police Department came up first for involvement in a number of deaths with a total of 269. The New York City Police Department came in second with 240, even though the city wasn’t listed as having a high number of deaths as indicated in the previous data workings. The Houston police Department came in third with involvement in 164 deaths. The fourth was the Chicago Police Department.
Overall, I wanted to see whether police departments played a significant role in the deaths recorded. It appears as if the vast majority of the deaths are noted at the hands of police. There were not significant numbers listed for the U.S. Border Patrol or the FBI.
## [1] "anchorage_police_department"
## [2] "anchorage_corrections_department"
## [3] "bethel_police_department"
## [4] "alaska_police_department"
## [5] "fairbanks_police_department"
## [6] "north_pole_police_department"
## [7] "alaska_state_troopers"
## [8] "fairbanks_police_department__alaska_state_troopers"
## [9] "alaska_state_troopers_and_fairbanks_police_department"
## [10] "juneau_police_department"I then decided to see if mental health played a prominent role since it was a variable that was tracked by the data. I found that in the large majority of cases, metal health did not play a role – in close to over 7,000 cases. It was unknown as to whether mental health issues played a role in close to 3,000 cases. In 1,663 cases, mental health issues did in fact play a role.
I then decided to look for the official disposition of death and to see the variable available in that instance. There were 171 official dispositions recorded.
## [1] "unreported" "justified"
## [3] "criminal" "suicide"
## [5] "unknown" "pending_investigation"
## [7] "accidental" NA
## [9] "excusable" "cleared"Zip Code location did not give much information. 81 times it was listed as NA. The top zip code, 60620, was listed only 22 times, with 33311 coming in second with 18 listed.
The zip code, 60620, is located in Chicago, Illinois while the zip code, 33311, is in Broward County, Florida and is predominately African-American demographically. The particular section of Chicago is also predominately African-American with over 70 percent of the population according to: city-data.com.
In terms of age, I found that twenty-somethings fared the worse with 22 being the age of the top number of deaths as 443. All of the top 11 ages were between the ages of 21 and 31.
subjects_age <- fatalencountersessential %>% count(subjects_age)Work in Progress: LA County Budgets and Resources
As part of a possible future project, I have begun transcribing data on the Los Angeles County budget in order to determine amounts spent on various services as well as the amount of revenue being brought in.
Since Los Angeles had the highest count of deaths according to the Fatal Encounters data, I looked at the budget for the years 2001- 2006. I first looked at the total revenue for each year and then how much revenue was actually derived from citizens based on estimates.
I first went into the Los Angeles County website and transcribed the budget data from 2001-2006 paying particular attention to revenue from taxes and court fines, fees, and services as well as the expenditure on things like education and public protection. This is a work in progress, and I hope to continue working to find data that might illuminate the amount of money from the budget that is citizen-derived inn the form of fines, fees, forfeitures and taxes. For now, I can leave you with a visual of the table I created and some of the beginning of my plots on the LA County Budget.
## Source: local data frame [6 x 3]
##
## total_citizen_derived_income fines_forefeitures_penalties_actual_general
## (dbl) (int)
## 1 1236869000 179879000
## 2 4084808000 192427000
## 3 4830194000 189982000
## 4 4654930000 202648000
## 5 1493158000 220622000
## 6 2570396000 232762000
## Variables not shown: charges_services_actual (dbl)I then decided to map some of the data from the Fatal Encounters database to get a visual of the occurrences of death. Because the database includes data from 2000 until the present, I narrowed the data to between 2000 and 2010 for Census Tract Data.
In Progress I was attempting to do a map like the following: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/upshot/data-on-transfer-of-military-gear-to-police-departments.html?abt=0002&abg=1
Below are some of the different code I tried in my attempt, but I ran into a few errors, so this is still a work in progress. #```{r} gs_key(“17JlO5eKVbN57GNkOH3kDNW0c9ArE1kgUah3ZEB3ii9k”) gs_download(“https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17JlO5eKVbN57GNkOH3kDNW0c9ArE1kgUah3ZEB3ii9k/pub?output=csv”)
census_2000_2010 <- read_csv(“https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17JlO5eKVbN57GNkOH3kDNW0c9ArE1kgUah3ZEB3ii9k/pub?output=csv”)
gs_key(“1VukbkMbOZBGsgfeZEqCnZj4vJwR45smBuKfaSSSGqlk”) gs_download(“https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VukbkMbOZBGsgfeZEqCnZj4vJwR45smBuKfaSSSGqlk/pub”) codebook_2010 <- parse_nhgis_codebook(“https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VukbkMbOZBGsgfeZEqCnZj4vJwR45smBuKfaSSSGqlk/pub”)
```
```{r}
url<-“http://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/GENZ2010/gz_2010_us_040_00_500k.zip” downloaddir<-“~/R/Fatal Encounters Data/census data” destname<-“tiger.zip” download.file(url, destname) unzip(destname, exdir=downloaddir, junkpaths=TRUE)
shp <-readOGR(dsn=path.expand(“~/R/Fatal Encounters Data/census data”), layer = “gz_2010_us_040_00_500k”)
leaflet(shp)
subdat<-spTransform(subdat, CRS(“+init=epsg:4326”))
plot(shp)
glimpse(shp@data)
population_2010 <- read_csv(“https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17JlO5eKVbN57GNkOH3kDNW0c9ArE1kgUah3ZEB3ii9k/pub?output=csv”)
counties_2010 %>% left_join(population_2010, by = “GISJOIN”)
binpal <- colorBin(“Blues”, counties_2010, 6, na.color = “white”, pretty = FALSE)
leaflet(counties_2010) %>% addTiles() %>% addPolygons(stroke = FALSE, fillOpacity = 1, color = ~binpal()
) %>% scale_point <- function(x, multiplier = 1) { multiplier * rescale(sqrt(x)) }
state_deaths <- fatalencountersessential %>% mutate(state = location_of_death_state) %>%
label = str_c("state", "<br>",
"deaths_by_city"
)leaflet(fatalencountersessential) %>% addTiles() %>% addCircleMarkers(popup = ~label)
leaflet(fatalencountersessential) %>% addTiles() %>% addCircleMarkers(lng = ~long, lat = ~lat, popup = ~label)
leaflet(fatalencountersessential) %>% addTiles() %>% addCircleMarkers(lng = ~long, lat = ~lat) addCircleMarkers(popup = ~label, radius = ~scale_point(confessions, 15), fillOpacity = 0, weight = 2) addCircleMarkers(popup = ~label, clusterOptions = markerClusterOptions()) addPolygons(data = fatalencountersessential, fill = FALSE, color = “gray”, weight = 2)
scale_point <- function(x, multiplier = 1) { multiplier * rescale(sqrt(x)) }
fatalencountersessential %>% group_by(location_of_death_state) %>% count(location_of_death_state) %>%
census_2000_2010 %>% states_data <- data_frame(
STATES = c("Alabama", “Alaska”, “Arizona”, “Arkansas”, “California”, “Colorado”, “Connecticut”, “Delaware”, “Florida”, “Georgia”, “Hawaii”, “Idaho”, “Illinois”, “Indiana”, “Iowa”, “Kansas”, “Kentucky”, “Louisiana”, “Maine”, “Maryland”, “Massachusetts”, “Michigan”, “Minnesota”, “Mississippi”, “Missouri”, “Montana”, “Nebraska”, “Nevada”, “New Hampshire”, “New Jersey”, “New Mexico”, “New York”, “North Carolina”, “North Dakota”, “Ohio”, “Oklahoma”, “Oregon”, “Pennsylvania”, “Rhode Island”, “South Carolina”, “South Dakota”, “Tennessee”, “Texas”, “Utah”, “Vermont”, “Virginia”, “Washington”, “West Virginia” “Wisconsin”, “Wyoming” ), states_abb = c(“al”, “ak”, “az”, “ar”, “ca”, “co”, “ct”, “de”, “fl”, “ga”, “hi”, “id”, “il”, “in”, “ia”, “ks”, “ky”, “la”, “me”, “md”, “ma”, “mi”, “mn”, “ms”, “mo”, “mt”, “ne”, “nv”, “nh”, “nj”, “nm”, “ny”, “nc”, “nd”, “oh”, “ok”, “or”, “pa”, “ri”, “sc”, “sd”, “tn”, “tx”, “ut”, “vt”, “va”, “wa”, “wv”, “wi”, “wy”)
census_2000_2010 %>% left_join(fatalencountersessential, by = c(“location_of_death_state” = “STATE”) %>% leaflet(fatalencountersessential) %>% addTiles() %>% addCircleMarkers(popup = ~label) %>%
census_2000_2010 %>% deathtotalstate <- filter(STATE) %>%
left_join(location_of_death_state, STATE) %>% label = str_c(location_of_death_state, “
”, “numberofdeaths”, year, “
”) %>% filter(year == 2010) %>%
us_2010 <- us_states(“2010”)
leaflet(fatalencountersessential) %>% addTiles() %>% addCircleMarkers(popup = ~label)
Methods to Plot Choropleth Maps in R
load(url(“http://www.fabioveronesi.net/Blog/polygons.RData”))
#Standard method
#SP PACKAGE
#install.packages("sp")
library(sp)
#install.packages("rgeos")
library("rgeos")## rgeos version: 0.3-19, (SVN revision 524)
## GEOS runtime version: 3.3.8-CAPI-1.7.8
## Linking to sp version: 1.2-2
## Polygon checking: TRUE #install.packages("reshape2")
#install.packages("foreign")
#install.packages("plyr")
library("rgeos")
library("foreign")
library("plyr")## -------------------------------------------------------------------------## You have loaded plyr after dplyr - this is likely to cause problems.
## If you need functions from both plyr and dplyr, please load plyr first, then dplyr:
## library(plyr); library(dplyr)## -------------------------------------------------------------------------##
## Attaching package: 'plyr'## The following object is masked from 'package:lubridate':
##
## here## The following objects are masked from 'package:dplyr':
##
## arrange, count, desc, failwith, id, mutate, rename, summarise,
## summarizeOverall, I set out in the beginning of this project to really look at the idea of death and death that doesn’t seem to “count” - both in the literal sense, in the fact that deaths at the hands of police are not counted, but also in the realm of the social and the type of disavowal (to use Grace Hong) that happens with racialized bodies.
Weheliye and Spillers both discuss the ways in which bodies get categorized into human, not-so-human, and non-human, and the databases that I explored were an attempt to place some of these terms in the actual counts of deaths as well as the media narrative that categorizes in ways that call-up and continue systems of racializing assemblages. I was also interested in the idea of names. Saidiya Hartman, in “Lose Your Mother” discusses her journey to the slave castles of Ghana in an attempt to voice and name the bodies forgotten and discarded by the Middle Passage, but also created through the Middle Passage. In a way of calling-up a pre-history and giving a narrative to the technologies that made “black life” into the striations of what we see today. I think between Michael Brown’s body and in the words and images painted by Hartman, an ocean and a sidewalk separate the two. The beating and whippings into flesh and the technologies of physical and psychic violence are what’s inherited.
Movements like #BlackLivesMatter and the Fatal Encounters Data attempt something that seeks to make bodies whole or to make bodies fully human – and allowed a dignity or right to death and a collective sense of mourning. I have only attempt to think through a small section of that attempt, but it is a necessary rendering to call things: people and technologies by their names. So, I end with something that I also think is an attempt at a naming in the hopes of making whole.
Slave Voyages: What is in a Name?
The Slave Voyages website keeps track of the names of Africans enslaved and brought to the “New World”. The database has kept track of over 67,000 captives - but a small fraction of the millions, but it attempts at naming something that was thought to be totally forgotten. I think within a name, we can actually learn a great deal.
In the database, there were 25 young men, like Michael Orlandus Darrion Brown Jr., who would have fit the profile. About 25 of these captives were over 6 feet tall. About 25 were between the ages of 17 and 19. Here are their names. They only have first names, but Michael Orlandus Darrion Brown Jr. has a full name.
#gs_key("1qFBzTjN9lI3FfAqIYmw7qpuZQXPgfrOfFYhfEqE7ckA")
#gs_download("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qFBzTjN9lI3FfAqIYmw7qpuZQXPgfrOfFYhfEqE7ckA/pub?output=csv")
first_names <- read_csv("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qFBzTjN9lI3FfAqIYmw7qpuZQXPgfrOfFYhfEqE7ckA/pub?output=csv")
first_names$slave_name## [1] "Pehteh" "Markoas" "Arjurah"
## [4] "Gasboy" "Pattah" "Ahjallah"
## [7] "Cacuttah" "Ogoo" "Okoronko"
## [10] "Oloogobee" "Omoggah" "Ansallargay"
## [13] "Bomnafingory" "Mama" "Ajimmah"
## [16] "Lee" "Tappay" "Foveray"
## [19] "Affon" "Insacca" "Buremuna Ceesay"
## [22] "Incundo" "Latel Juff" "Odoo"
## [25] "Yebram"Bibliography
Journal Articles
Cacho, Lisa, “‘You Just Don’t Know How Much He Meant’: Death, Deviancy, and Devaluation,” Latino Studies (2007) 5, 182–208.
Spillers, Hortense, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics (1987) 17:2, 65-82.
Books
Foucault, Michel. Society Must be Defended (New York: Picador, 2003).
Hong, Grace. Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Weheliye, Alexander. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
News Articles
“10 Hours in Ferguson: A Visual Timeline of Michael Brown’s Death and Its Aftermath | Mother Jones.” Web. 2 May 2016.
“21 Numbers That Will Help You Understand Why Ferguson Is About More Than Michael Brown.” N.p. Web. 2 May 2016.
“Ferguson Documents: Officer Darren Wilson’s Testimony : The Two-Way : NPR.” Web. 28 Apr. 2016.
“Ferguson Missouri Crime Stats 2014: Blacks Arrested 4 Times As Much As Whites.” N.p. Web. 2 May 2016.
“Ferguson Police Defend Decision to Leave Michael Brown’s Body in the Street for 4 Hours | Breaking Brown.” N.p. Web. 27 Apr. 2016.
“Ferguson Protesters March On as the Movement’s Generational Divide Grows Deeper | VICE News.” Web. 2 Dec. 2015.
“Ferguson Protest Poster: ‘Go Kill ISIS and Leave Us Alone’ - NBC News.” Web. 2 May 2016.
“Ferguson’s Darren Wilson Is First 6’4, 210lb Child in History Says Piers Morgan | Daily Mail Online.” Web. 28 Apr. 2016.
“Ferguson’s Michael Brown: The Tall Tale of the ‘Gentle Giant.’” N. p. Web. 28 Apr. 2016.
“Ferguson Store Owner Says He Doesn’t Believe That’s Mike Brown On Surveillance Video - Counter Current News.”Web. 2 May 2016.
“Ferguson Timeline: Grief, Anger And Tension : The Two-Way : NPR.” Web. 28 Apr. 2016.
“Hit by Poverty, Ferguson Reflects the New Suburbs - CBS News.” Web. 13 Dec. 2015.
“How Ferguson’s Black Majority Can Take Control of Their City - In These Times.” Web. 8 Dec. 2015.
“How Ferguson’s Tickets, Fines Violated Rights of Blacks - CNN.com.” Web. 8 Dec. 2015.
“How Ferguson Went From Middle Class to Poor in a Generation | TIME.” Web. 13 Dec. 2015.
“‘I Felt like a Five-Year-Old Holding on to Hulk Hogan’: Darren Wilson in His Own Words | US News | The Guardian.” Web. 2 May 2016.
“Mike Brown Family Speaks Out on Teen’s Shooting By Police - TIME.” Web. 27 Apr. 2016.
“Nobody Knows How Many Americans The Police Kill Each Year | FiveThirtyEight.” Web. 2 May 2016.
“Seven Things Police Departments Are Doing Differently — AJ+ On the News — Medium.” Web. 8 Dec. 2015.
“What Mike Brown Did and Did Not Do inside of the Ferguson Convenience Store.” N. p. Web. 2 May 2016.
“Why Did Ferguson Police Release the Convenience Store Video? | MSNBC.” Web. 2 May 2016.