Teaching citizens how to shoot better video when they witness brutality

Fearful and distrustful of corrupt and abusive police forces, Nigerians by the thousands have downloaded locally developed mobile apps like Sety and Aabo to call friends for help during abductions or other emergencies. These first-responder apps feature panic buttons that alert contacts or people nearby during an emergency. The app makers do not share usage data, but users say they feel safer by having such apps available if they are harassed by the police or in need of protection from an attack.

To tell the stories of victims of forced displacement, property destruction, and occupation in South Sudan, a team of journalists devised a phone survey to gauge the extent of the problem. By surveying hard-to-reach people in refugee camps, one of many barriers to traditional reporting due to the government's repressive tactics, the reporters pinpointed areas where people had been forced off their land, many by government soldiers. The survey was recorded in six languages and was made statistically valid by consulting outside experts and transparently disclosing its limitations.

The CitizenApp allows Zimbabweans to anonymously report instances of government corruption, which are then made available to law enforcement officials and investigative journalists. The app has attracted 580 users since its launch in March 2023.

Once viewed as one of the nation's most brutal and corrupt police departments, New Orleans Police Department has earned steadily improving public support with a host of reforms. One reform that it took voluntarily, and in contrast with common practice in Louisiana, is to quickly release body-camera videos of police shootings and other uses of force. Though its effect is hard to untangle from other initiatives, video releases have become routine. In one case, a video prompted an official apology after proving rubber bullets were used against protesters. This helped lead to new restrictions on crowd control.

The groundswell for greater accountability in police shootings has barely caused a ripple in Hawaii, where the state’s Law Enforcement Officer Independent Review board has finished only one case in its first three years of existence and has suspended meetings during the pandemic. With one of its two citizen member slots vacant on an otherwise law-enforcement-heavy board, the panel fails a basic tenet of accountability by severely limiting public access to the cases it’s considering and its deliberations, says one critic.

Mobile phone apps allow NGOs to track public health threats. In Honduras, the medical charity, Medicine Sans Frontiers (MSF) uses GIS technology and mobile phone apps to assist in their efforts against dengue fever outbreaks. Apps allow residents to report outbreaks, which helps the charity apply its efforts where they are most needed. MSF also uses apps to learn about conditions in the communities it serves.

The Enid, Oklahoma police department has started using a service called RapidSOS to locate 911 calls coming from cell phones. Without the service, tracking where these calls come from can be a challenge, but RapidSOS allows them to access caller data, like what WiFi they’re on, to accurately pinpoint their location.

In what started as a series of posts on Twitter and evolved into a public database published by an investigative media outlet, Mediapart, a lone reporter documented police violence against France's Yellow Vest protesters in an act of accountability that had been neglected by other journalists and the government. David Dufresne's “Allô Place Beauvau” (a "hello" to France's interior ministry) documented 800 cases of police violence or misbehavior. Many of the cases came to Dufresne as tips from the public, which he then verified. His work was cited by French and international authorities.

When a new California law unlocked the disciplinary records on misconduct from 700 police agencies statewide, competing news organizations formed the California Reporting Project to accomplish as a team what would have been daunting, if not impossible, for each news organization individually: compile a database of all the records as they are released. Just months into the project, the resulting news stories informed the public of officers who escaped serious consequences for misconduct, and whose careers benefited from keeping the public unaware.

In response to the discovery that Chicago police officer Jon Burge led a "Midnight Crew" torturing mostly Black men to coerce criminal confessions, the city council's agreement to make cash reparations to the victims included a mandated curriculum in public schools to teach high school students the truth of what happened. Critics called the curriculum, "Reparations Won," anti-police propaganda. But a rare and lengthy observation of one class' experience showed its effects on youth. Not only did they learn the history, but they also learned the possibility of change in the face of systemic injustice.