Photo/ ERIC MARKS
Two years before Ferguson, D. Brian Burghart of Reno began a census of people killed by police.
The Washington Post won a Pulitzer for creating a database of people killed by police. We were there first. BY D. BRIAN BURGHART Earlier this month, the Washington Post was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its project on police violence, “Fatal Force.” The Pulitzer Prize Board singled out the paper “For its revelatory initiative in creating and using a national database to illustrate how often and why the police shoot to kill and who the victims are most likely to be.” The paper’s media reporter, Paul Farhi, provided details on the win in an April 18 write-up: “After covering several high-profile incidents involving the killings of civilians by police officers in 2014, Washington Post staff writer Wesley Lowery was surprised to discover that there were no official statistics about such fatalities. So Lowery pitched an idea to his editors: The newspaper, he suggested, should collect the information itself and analyze it for patterns in law enforcement.” Except that’s not exactly how it went down. I know, because I was the one who suggested the idea to Lowery. Back in 2012, I was the editor and publisher of the RN&R. After a fatal police shooting in Reno, I did some digging and discovered that no local, state or federal
on a piece about the lack of national information about police shootings, and have seen your work everywhere. Caught the piece you wrote for Gawker, and was hoping you might have a few minutes to chat sometime today about your work to catalog every police shooting. Let me know if you’ve got a few minutes to chat, Wesley
agency accurately kept track of such shootings. So I decided to start a website and database, called Fatal Encounters, to collect and log data on police killings. My colleagues, students from the University of Nevada, Reno, volunteers, and I began collecting data on deadly police violence and releasing it for free to anyone who wanted to use it for any reason. Universities, artists, news media, activists, national politicians, police organizations and even the FBI used our data. But interest in the Fatal Encounters database exploded after Aug. 9, 2014, when Michael Brown, an unarmed black youth, was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Shortly after Brown was killed, I published a story on Gawker, “What I’ve learned from two years collecting data on police killings,” Aug. 22, 2014. A couple of weeks later, I got an email from Wesley Lowery, at the time a Congressional reporter at the Washington Post, who had read the piece:
Wesley Lowery Congressional Reporter The Washington Post | Post Politics | The Fix
We talked on the phone the next day, and during the course of our interview, I told Lowery it was absurd that a grad student and editor at a four-person alternative newsweekly in Reno, Nevada, should be doing the job of the national press in his spare time, and I suggested the Post should pick it up. A few minutes after our chat, he got back to me, writing, “Thanks! Immediately after I got off of the phone I ran over to my bosses to insist that we get a databasing project underway. Will keep you posted.”
From: Lowery, Wesley J To: D. Brian Burghart Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 7:34 AM Reaching out because I’m working
A few days later, Lowery published a story on the lack of statistics on police shootings. He was complimentary of Fatal Encounters’ work, writing that “prior to the Brown’s [sic] shooting, the only person attempting to keep track of the number of police shootings was D. Brian Burghart, the editor and publisher of the 29,000-circulation Reno News & Review, who launched his ‘Fatal Encounters’ project in 2012.” When Lowery’s story ran, Fatal Encounters had already gathered more than a year’s worth of data, which was incorporated in numerous stories by the RN&R and other media such as TruthOut, CNN and CounterPunch. When I submitted the RN&R’s work to the Pulitzer Board for consideration for the 2015 Public Service Award, on January 25, 2015, we had more than 4,000 entries cataloging all deaths that happened during interactions with law enforcement in the United States, and the complete data for nine states going back to 2000. (By contrast, the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fatal Force” series contained 990 shooting fatalities for the year 2015.) We’ve cataloged 1,143 gun homicides involving police during 2015
“LOST IN THE POST” continued on page 14 OPINION
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