Sinyangwe detailed how he led a grassroots movement to document police violence.

Welcome Week at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy concluded with a Keynote address by Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist who focuses on ending racism and police violence in America. He is the co-founder of Campaign Zero, Mapping Police Violence, and OurStates

Growing up as a young black boy in Orlando, Florida, Sinyangwe experienced many of the forces of inequity that have been at work in American society for generations. Motivated to determine what within the American political system perpetuates these inequities, Sinyangwe chose to study political science for his undergraduate studies, focusing on how race and racism affect the political system. 

Samuel Sinyangwe
Samuel Sinyangwe

After graduating in 2012, Sinyangwe began working with PolicyLink, a national research and action institute dedicated to advancing racial and economic equity, where he helped to implement Promise Neighborhoods, one of the Obama administration’s signature anti-poverty programs. This initiative helped 61 federally funded communities with concentrated poverty levels build cradle-to-career systems of support for the low-income families they serve and develop data systems that allow those same communities to track the distribution of services and hold everyone in the community accountable for such. 

“This was one of the largest infusions of resources into communities of concentrated poverty at the neighborhood level that we have seen in terms of public policy,” Sinyangwe said. 

“My trajectory changed on August 9, 2014, which was the day Mike Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri.” – Samuel Sinyangwe

Caleb Herod MPP Class of 2020
Caleb Herod MPP Class of 2020

Caleb Herod MPP Class of 2020, who introduced Sinyangwe, remembers being so inspired by Sinyangwe’s decision to leave his job at PolicyLink to get on the ground in Ferguson. 

“Here was someone who was using his mind and all his capabilities and influence to make actual, lasting change, not content to just stay in an office, and not content to do work from afar, but really wanting to get on the ground level and do the work,” Herod said. “He wanted to pursue a path of equity, inclusion and using research for social impact.”

Upon arriving in Ferguson, Sinyangwe and other activists were initially dismissed by policy makers and the media for lacking the data to validate the police violence taking place in Missouri and across the country. 

“The reason we didn’t have data wasn’t the fault of communities,” Sinyangwe said, noting that there was more federal government data available on annual rainfall in rural Missouri for the past 100 years than there was on the number of police shootings in the same area. Inconsistent self-reporting by local precincts with zero accountability resulted in a methodological fail.  

Sinyangwe and activists on the ground in Ferguson knew they couldn’t wait for the federal government to catch up on improving their systems for collecting such information; they needed to create their own system. 

In April 2015, a couple of months into the protests, Sinyangwe co-founded and launched Mapping Police Violence, which aggregates raw information in order to produce tangible data on police killings across the country each year. Data for the annual count is culled from crowdsourced databases, public records requests and searches across social media, obituaries, criminal records databases, police reports and other sources. 

“The reason we launched this map was to convince the nation there was a national crisis," Sinyangwe said. “It may sound unfamiliar now, but back in 2015, there were a lot of people who believed there was a crisis in Baltimore or in St. Louis. But in white communities, they did not believe it was a systemic issue, but rather a series of isolated events.” 

Sinyangwe and his colleagues used data to push back against the erroneous assumption that police brutality wasn’t a systemic issue requiring a national approach. In sharing some of the progress — such as the 107 new laws enacted to address police violence since Campaign Zero was incepted in 2015 — made through the work of each of his several initiatives, Sinyangwe impressed upon Harris students the importance of utilizing data as a tool to create effective public policy and advance social change. 

Here are the five key lessons Sinyangwe had for Harris students as they prepared for their first week of classes:

1. Don’t wait for permission.

When Sinyangwe launched Mapping Police Violence, he had no funding, nor any support from his superiors within a larger institution. Many organizations and advocates, although sympathetic and supportive of his cause, felt the federal government should collect the data needed to enact change. 

But Sinyangwe knew he and his collaborators had to go after the data themselves. “I knew the power of data to convince policy makers to enact the types of policy changes that needed to happen to address this issue,” he said. 

“Don’t wait for your idea to be greenlit by some funder, by some foundation, by some rich benefactor; don’t wait for your idea to be greenlit by some professor or nonprofit.”

2. Make your research accessible and actionable.

People need to be able to utilize data to in order to enact change, and policymakers need not stick to traditional academic means of data research distribution in order to share their findings. 

“We have to be results based, we have to recognize there are pathways to creating change that are outside academia, that leverage social media...in forms that are more accessible to the masses.”

3. Interrogate the assumptions of your field.

“It is not a fact that police use deadly force in violent areas to protect themselves,” Sinyangwe said. And yet, within this realm of public policy, this assumption is treated as fact. Data allowed Sinyangwe and other policy accountability activists and data scientists to test — and disprove — this narrative with projects such as the Police Use of Force Project. 

4. Identify and advance evidence-based solution. 

“It’s not enough to just challenge and dismantle some of the oppressive ideologies that have gotten us to this place. We must also use data to identify and advance effective solutions that go further than proposing interesting ideas or opine about the value of body cameras or police trainings. It means using data to identify what works.” 

The Police Use of Force Project analyzes use of force policies at precincts across the country to show a correlation between less aggressive use of force policies and fewer instances of police killings, finding that police forces with more barriers to condoned use of force had far fewer instances of need, creating an overall safer working environments for officers.

This data has resulted in improvements to use of force policies at the local level across the country and in more than forty states, as well as the federal level with the PEACE Act. 

“It’s not enough to put answers out there, and solutions and data, you have to think about how you’re putting it out there, how you’re making it accessible, how are you ensuring that people across the country can use this in their work to enact change in their own communities?”

5.  It will take all of us to win.

“The work that you’re all on a journey to do in this world can save lives, and you should hold yourself accountable to nothing less.”