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Format each incident with special "accountability" subheader

Open vandervecken opened this issue 4 years ago • 4 comments

Something I notice is that we are not doing a good job of separating the evidence of the incident with the evidence of the accountability. I recommend creating a specific subhead. Something like this:


Title: Police shove elderly man, causing him to fall on the back of his head | June 4th

Incident: Two police officers shove an unarmed, elderly man, who falls backwards and strikes his head on the concrete sidewalk. He appears to be bleeding. Location: Niagara Square

Incident Links: A, B, C

Accountability: Buffalo P.D. released an official statement saying that he "tripped and fell." They have now opened an investigation into the incident.

Accountability Links: D, E, F


In the long term as we move towards resolution, being able to track accountability evidence as distinct from incident evidence will be useful.

vandervecken avatar Jun 05 '20 05:06 vandervecken

I'm not sure who accepts PRs and runs this repository, but if that person/people indicate they will accept PRs of this nature, we can get on with reformatting it as we go.

vandervecken avatar Jun 05 '20 17:06 vandervecken

+1 for this. A response/resolution attribute or object would be terrific.

yo-mike avatar Jun 06 '20 02:06 yo-mike

@vandervecken

Sorry for the delay. There's a lot of police brutality happening and only a few of us.

I don't think that any of us in the org have the bandwidth to do this right now, if I'm being completely honest. However, this is an open source project and we have, thanks to @ubershmekel , a data rewriter tool. My suggestion would be to experiment with this yourself and see if you can reformat links in a programmatic manner that won't upset the other build tools.

Of course the painstaking thing then will be to dig through 800+ incidents and manually parse them out. But if we're able to get the format auto-applied, then we can slowly roll out the actual modifications on city-by-city level

emarcey avatar Jul 30 '20 14:07 emarcey

I would suggest adding links that include an "accountability: " in the beginning of the link text. E.g.

### Police arrest two reporters | June 3

Police arrested two AL.com journalists covering a protest at 7:35 on June 3. There was a 7PM curfew in effect, which exempted journalists who were carrying a letter from their media outlet; both arrested journalists were carrying such a letter and had press lanyards. Both journalists were released shortly thereafter; while in custody, they were photographed. Birmingham police later said that the arrest was made for the journalists' safety.

tags: arrest, journalist

id: al-birmingham-1

**Links**

* [Accountability: nyt report](https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2020/06/two-reporters-taken-into-custody-after-covering-birmingham-protest.html)

That way we could have this data without breaking the current format.

Note the v-2 json api provides the link alongside the link text. That way downstream tools could support this format too.

ubershmekel avatar Aug 01 '20 20:08 ubershmekel