Tracking Police Brutality Using React
Introduction
Today marks a little over a year ago when the infamous video of George Floyd pleading for his life came to our attention. Not only has this incident which, was viewed worldwide was seen as tragic, but it also gave us questions of how other incidents of police brutality can theoretically occur anywhere but without video proof of them happening, their perpetrators can’t be brought to justice. I was given a unique opportunity to work alongside an organization Human Rights First to build upon a web application that not only tracks reports of police brutality but also categorizes them in terms of lethality and importance. One fear going into this partnership was that we didn’t understand the algorithm that goes into tracking instances of police brutality. Especially one in which it uses sources that might seem questionable to a segment of Americans. Other than those concerns, my team and I were excited to jump into the code base and expand upon it.
Challenges
As stated before, one of the challenges of this project was finding a way to categorize the lethality of each specific instance of police brutality across the continental US. The best approach that my team and the previous team found was by ranking these lethality levels of 5.
In doing so, we hope to filter out the incidents of lethal force from other mundane categories such as officer presence. My contribution primarily has to do with changing the appearance of the Home Page. At first, when I was allowed to work with the code, the website appeared as though it was built in 2012. So I and with the help of my teammates redesigned the Home page from the bottom up.
An Example was the Navigation Bar I designed using Ant Design.
Even though it’s not much, it gives a perspective of how powerful UI libraries are and especially with making the product in question look up to date.
Honestly, the only challenge that I came across was trying to learn a new framework just for a specific project. But this opened so many doors since ill know how to utilize Ant Design in a future project.
Reflections
After working with this project, building upon it and generally contribute towards it. It shows that it still needs to be worked on, to be passed onto another group who can fix some of the issues that we still have. One of which would include the categorize of police presence. An example would be that the bot that’s in charge of the categorize will see a Twitter post with the word “Police”, “Gun” and “baby” and automatically assumes that the encounter is a category 5. Hopefully, the future bot categorizes intent. The end result is something to looks attractive Human Rights Watch: Blue Witness