“Led by the nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), the process began with creating a merged dataset of “fully identified victims” to avoid double counting. Only casualties whose complete details were listed — such as their full name, date of death and the governorate they had been killed in — were included on this initial list, explained Megan Price, executive director at HRDAG. If details were missing, the victim could not be confidently cross-checked across the eight organizations’ lists, and so was excluded. This provided HRDAG and the U.N. with a minimum count of individuals whose deaths were fully documented by at least one of the different organizations. … “
Tarak Shah is quoted with regard to the National Police Index: “Police often avoid accountability by moving to another agency rather than face discipline. This tool, allowing anyone to look up and track the histories of such officers, provides an invaluable service for the human rights community in our fight against impunity.”
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HRDAG’s analysis and expertise continues to deepen the national conversation about police violence and criminal legal reform in the United States. In 2015 we began by considering undocumented victims of police violence, relying on the same methodological approach we’ve tested internationally for ...
Elizabeth Eagen of the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University will expand the HRDAG advisory board.
We have specified "Some Rights Reserved" on our website, instead of the more conventional "All Rights Reserved." This is because some of our web content is covered by a Creative Commons license, which means that it may be copied and even re-purposed, with some stipulations. We have made this decision because HRDAG wants to contribute to the digital commons, defined by Creative Commons as "a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law."
Our Creative Commons License
We are using the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, also known as the BY-NC-SA license. Here is ...
A follow-up chapter exploring recent advancements in LLM technology and extraction strategies.
I've been working with various projects in Guatemala to document mass violence since 1993, so in 2011, when Claudia Paz y Paz asked me to revisit the analysis I did for the Commission for Historical Clarification examining the differential mortality rates due to homicide for indigenous and non-indigenous people in the Ixil region, I was delighted. We have far better data processing and statistical methods than we had in 1998, plus much more data. I think the resulting analysis is a conservative lower bound on total homicides of indigenous people. (more…)
The need to establish the truth around events is central to goals of transitional justice, particularly securing accountability, establishing legitimate and effective justice mechanisms, and laying the foundations for a peaceful society.
Documentation to provide verifiable and widely accepted accounts of such events is a critical component of establishing this truth, or the multiple truths that may exist for a population. It is difficult to overstate the important role of documentation in transitional justice efforts. If some of what follows sounds familiar, echoing points of previous posts, it is no coincidence. Documentation, in a word, is the ...
HRDAG contributes to the project by helping to classify, filter, extract, and standardize the records so that they can be useful in the database.
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MfThopD7L1Y?list=PL8mc5VYrQH_Nx9jSWF2rYEgQhHyVobk6s" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>Kristian Lum, lead statistician at HRDAG | <em>Predictive Policing: Bias In, Bias Out</em> | 56 mins
Ayan Sheikh of PBS News Hour reports on the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Right’s release of HRDAG’s third report on reported killings in the Syrian conflict.
From the article:
The latest death toll figure covers the period from March 2011 to April of this year, came from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and is the third study of its kind on Syria. The analysis group identified 191,269 deaths. Data was collected from five different sources to exclude inaccuracies and repetitions.
PBS News Hour
Ayan Sheikh
August 22, 2014
Link to story on PBS News Hour
Related blogpost (Updated Casualty Count for Syria)
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Our newest Data Science Fellow, Will Taylor, is currently a doctoral student in political science and public policy at the University of Michigan.