What’s in a Name: Michael Brown and the data of death in the U.S.: an exploration of deaths through interactions with U.S. law enforcement
by Tauheeda Yasin/Cultural Studies, George Mason University
##SayTheirNames: Death’s Aftermath
The scenes of faces obscured by smoke, masks, and gear admidst 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 Jr., 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 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 the unrest, and Michael Orlandus Darrion Brown Jr.’s death unfolded in such a way that the dysfunction that is race in the U.S. was spoken - exploding in the all too familiar “American grammar” (to use Hortense Spillers) of black bodies and death. It is a grammar that was unmistakable to many as a “fleshy” rendering of a body, Michael Brown’s, and therefore everyBODY 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…“. Spiller calls this:”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 as Spillers refers to the Great Long National Shame of slavery, has left the indelible mark of a racial “symbolic order”, which is never forgotten and always present. Many know the shame to stink, even in the face of an official narrative of post-racialism. The refrain is: we have a black president and thus the stench of slavery and the racism of Jim Crow has been surmounted, packed away, and regulated to history’s pages – it should only be dregged up in February in the manner of children’s coloring book pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coke commercials featuring brown faces and history facts. Because in America, we have equal opportunity.
The contradictions in the narrative of post-racialism, within the fact that written laws exist stating that Jim Crow is of the past - the same Jim Crow laws of colored signs and water founatins and back of the bus laws, but also of lowered eye lids, murmurings of “gal” and “boy”, and winks that could get one killed, how do we situate the recent constant viewing of black death, a never forgotten American grammar, in America’s psyche?
How do we discuss and strategize in Ferguson and Charlotte within a context of shame, victim-blaming, historic dehumanization, and flesh? What is it about the viewing of black bodies like Michael Brown, Terrence Crutcher, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray, to name a few, that invoke a mix of fear and anger for some and a sentiment of incredulous by others? Why then, does Michael Brown’s death permeate within this vein of a history never forgotten – a history of the marking of bodies within this social order into bare flesh?
The answer is that 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, and especially not to Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Darrion Orlandus Brown Jr. It also didn’t and doesn’t matter to millions of Americans when the news reported on his death and the deaths of so many others in interactions with the police.
Let us unpack how the unfolding of a death, one death, Michael Brown’s – invoked not only fear and anger, but a traumatic recalling of events that are historic and terror-filled.
The unfolding
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 in 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.
Michael Orlandus Darrion Brown Jr. Killed on August 9, 2014. Photo taken from Twitter User: @TheePharoh
To many, Michael 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. And later, “SayTheirNames”.
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 worshipping in a church. Confessed. The police brought him Burger King because he was hungry.
We continue to see this time and time again with each death – the numerous minutes it takes for police to call for an ambulance after shooting a person, the nonchalant attitude in regard to human life, the disregard for black life.
Michael Brown’s stepfather was photographed holding up a sign that read, “Ferguson Police Just Executed My Unarmed Son!!”
Michael Brown’ stepfather Photo taken from
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.
A transcript was released of Officer Wilson testifying as to why he shot Michael Darrion Orlandus Brown. 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.”<
Warren’s testimony, again a historic reminder, again recalling familiar racializing assemblages that render black bodies inhuman, Warren’s testimony is textbook American grammar.
As Alexander Weheliye writes, in Habeas Viscus, the “fictions of skin color” as well as the other visual markers of blackness “obscure, and therefore facilitate, the continued existence and intergenerational transmission of the hieroglyphics of the flesh”. In other words, this “hierogylphics of the flesh”, didn’t begin or does it end with Michael Brown, or his father, or his father’s father. It began with his ancestor who set foot on that slave ship, as Spillers says, accounting for “bare life” that in the context of racial slavery has given “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, non human.
As Weheliye writes, Spiller’s theory of flesh “highlights one significant instance of this biocultural stigmatic apparatus” where racialized assemblages invent “human phenomenology with an aura of extrahuman physiology”. As Weheliye notes, these hierolyphs “dwell among us in the fissures of our current governing configuration of the human as Man; they are the ether that animates racializing assemblages” and this ether “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 him 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.
This is a common grammar – spoken not just recently, but with historic familiarity. The grammar of Michael Brown’s death went viral because it was a visceral and visual reminder of the historicism of the racializing assemblages of black bodies in the U.S. – in a continuance of a long history of death and dehumanization.
It wasn’t just Michael Brown who had died, but his body, broadcasted to millions rendered he and all other black bodies like his as not “mattering”. It harkened back to a time in the U.S. when bodies like Michael Brown’s lay dead, were mutilated and masqueraded in front of crowds for sport, hung from trees. As Billie Holiday’s refrain of “strange fruit/black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze/strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees/Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck/For the rain to gather/for the wind to suck/For the sun to rot/for the tree – as the words sang out to us.
The same discard for the fruit of black bodies that Billie Holiday’s sang of in 1939, calling attention to the terror of lynching, was again felt, not just the terror of death, but of the precarious social conventions that could produce death; these feelings were transmuted through his body. Because Michael Brown deserved it, because all those before him 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 in 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. According to 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, the Chief backtracked, telling the newspaper that the reason that Brown was stopped was not because he was blocking traffic, but because Wilson “saw cigars in Brown’s hand and realized he might be the robber” that police were searching for.
The Ferguson Police Chief’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 the police had refused to disclose Darren Wilson’s name for many days and even after media requests, the incident report and autopsy were not released until well after.
*The details here get hazy, but also specific. In an attempt to track the legality of the shooting, and the precision with which the law is handled in the U.S. – the facts emerged in snippets.
There was discrepancy over who saw what, what happened beforehand, and what facts demonstrated his deservance of death.
Facts that piled up: Dorian Johnson, who allegedly witnessed Darren Wilson shooting Brown stated that Brown had taken cigars from a convenience store. Another fact: Police said that Brown was shot after trying to grab Wilson’s weapon. And yet another fact: Johnson and another witness, Tiffany Mitchell, stated that Brown was trying to run away from Wilson when he was gunned down.
In the midst of the facts and the media inquiry, acusations surfaced that the police were trying to retroactively justify Brown’s death.
One attendee at the police press conference shouted out, “seems like you’re only answering questions that demean the character of Mike Brown.” Michael Borwn’s family hd also released a statement that 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)
Death and Meaning
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.
If they gunned me down example – taken from Philly.com
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.
The Fatal Encounters database is a crowdsourced database that maintains the number of people killed in interactions with the police. 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.
Unlike typical databases of only numbers, the Fatal Encounters database has links to pictures and newstories in addition to specifics such as: date of death, location, and age. It tracks 13 specific variables - including name, agency responsible for the death, county, and zip code where the death occured as well. Fatal Encounters is one of the few databases of its kind. In an age of neoliberal governmental policy, it is no wonder that the most comprehensive data on deaths through police interactions is not from a government source or an academic source, but through newspapers - especially the New York Times, which has done extensive reporting on deaths in law enforcement interactions.
These deaths might provide insight into just how many people die at the hands of police and other law enforcement: a figure not tracked. 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 means of intervention.
Data does offer points of possible intervention, but it cannot and will not tell the entire story; however, it does hold currency within dominant frameworks that create and define meaning as well as narratives of humanity and worth. Thus, the use of data in this fashion might afford us the opportunity to engage.
I do think, however, that the use of non-standard variables in tracking, especially in the stories and pictures of those that have died, might also offer some alternatives to dominant power regimes. In #SayingTheirNames and seeing their faces and their stories, data is used not only as a tool within a power framework. I say this firmly interested in the tradition of the scholar-activist committed to actions that might serve to change dominant frameworks and narratives that prop up normative narratives of human worth.
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 of biopolitics does offer some possibilities for conceptualizing the role of death and state racism/technologies that render some worthy of interventions to “let live” – in particular in view of state policies of racism in the allocation of resources. Reading biopwer in the deaths of Michael Brown and others like he and Brandon Martinez as simply surplus, is one reading that folds neatly into the theory of “live and let die”. 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 space doesn’t allow for further development, but it is an area in need of further scholarly review and activism.
However, the technologies of “live and let dies” (247) as Foucalt discusses in Society Must Be Defended, and the use of data/statistics for biopolitical measures in population contro under state technologies and state interventions according to Foucault, have a dimension that offers up the ability for us to “tell the state about itself” - in other words, using the mechanisms of biopolitical regimes to expose and ultimately dismantle through the logic that the state is interested in perserving itself.
For Foucault, “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. Names are important. Names designate life. the database also 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.
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. This paper only looks at a few of the factors that possibly influence death; it also attempts at providing some context.
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. In addition, as Brookings Intitute reported, " Between 2000 and 2010-2012, Ferguson’s poor population doubled. By the end of that period, roughly one in four residents lived below the federal poverty line ($23,492 for a family of four in 2012), and 44 percent fell below twice that level." (Kneebone 2014)
## # A tibble: 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.
## # A tibble: 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 patterns for understanding demographics, which can add 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 official narrative is that police officers are tasked with the job to “protect and serve”" communities. When people die while in custody or while in interaction with law enforcement, the state’s official narrative is that state violence and death would be rare and unavoidable and not a norm – this is particularly in the sense that the overarching duty of the police is not to harm, but to protect as the state officially announces. What the data can tell and possibly counter-narrate are fissures and 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
## # ... with 2 more variables: location_of_death_state == "mo" <lgl>,
## # n <int>I wanted to know their names.
## # A tibble: 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
## # ... with 4 more variables: 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. So, the data can tell us that physical death within interactions with the police rendered two deaths. Within themselves, the data doesn’t explain qhy, again, Michael Brown’s death in particular spurred the type of response from the community that it did.
Further Exploration: Fatal Encounters
I next 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 that 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 in 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 tell us more about the amount of money from the budget that is citizen-derived in 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.
## total_citizen_derived_income fines_forefeitures_penalties_actual_general
## 1 1236869000 179879000
## 2 4084808000 192427000
## 3 4830194000 189982000
## 4 4654930000 202648000
## 5 1493158000 220622000
## 6 2570396000 232762000
## charges_services_actual
## 1 1056990000
## 2 3892381000
## 3 4640212000
## 4 4452282000
## 5 1272536000
## 6 2337634000I 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
Here is a heatframe map of all of the citizen sourced law enforcement related deaths since 2010. This does not include all of the deaths over this past summer.
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Overall, I set out in the beginning of this project to really look at the idea of death and the death that doesn’t seem to “count” - both in the literal sense, in the fact that deaths at the hands of police, these deaths 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 – allowed a dignity or right to death and a collective sense of mourning. I have only attempted 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 - only 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")## Parsed with column specification:
## cols(
## slave_date_arrived = col_integer(),
## slave_height = col_integer(),
## slave_country_sort = col_character(),
## slave_age = col_integer(),
## text = col_character(),
## slave_disembarkation_port_sort = col_character(),
## slave_source = col_character(),
## slave_sex_age = col_character(),
## slave_name_sort = col_character(),
## slave_embarkation_port = col_integer(),
## slave_id = col_integer(),
## slave_embarkation_port_sort = col_character(),
## slave_voyage = col_integer(),
## slave_name = col_character(),
## slave_voyage_number = col_integer(),
## slave_ship_name = col_character(),
## slave_ship_name_sort = col_character(),
## slave_disembarkation_port = col_integer(),
## slave_country = col_character()
## ) 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.