How They Did It: Reuters’ Database of #Taser Deaths
▻https://gijn.org/2017/10/02/how-they-did-it-reuters-massive-database-of-taser-deaths
In a sweeping investigation, a team of Reuters reporters, editors and data analysts raised serious questions about the claim of Taser’s manufacturer that no one has died directly from the device’s shock. Reviewing the results of hundreds of autopsies, filing hundreds of public records requests and other painstaking open-source research made the investigation possible.
“For example, we might have a news story that mentioned a death, but we wouldn’t have the person’s identity or it would be unclear whether a Taser was involved, so we’d use police records to flesh out the facts and determine whether the case met the criteria we’d set for cases we were including in our database. Once a case was confirmed to meet our criteria, we’d move it to a master spreadsheet and it would be assigned to a reporter for further investigation.
“We used a similar process to sort through legal databases, such as Westlaw, Lexis and Pacer. Again, we’d use the broadest possible search parameters to identify any lawsuit involving Tasers (in addition to using ‘Taser’ as a key word, we also used various iterations of the more generic phrases used to describe these weapons, such as ‘electronic control device’).
“This process returned thousands of court records, and we went through every one of them to see if it qualified as a Taser-related wrongful death suit (we decided early in the project to focus only on fatalities and opted not to tally injury cases, because the universe simply would have been too large to manage). Reviewing the lawsuits was an enormously time-consuming and painstaking process.
“Our search for lawsuits served two functions: not only was it the basis for our assessment of the litigation burden associated with fatal police incidents involving Tasers, it also turned up scores of deaths that got no coverage from local news media. So if we’d used only news reports as a way to track down fatal incidents involving Tasers, we would have missed a lot of them. This was particularly true in more rural areas or in big cities where a fatal police incident, in itself, might not get covered in local news accounts.”
