Photo illustration: Peter Pietrangelo, USA TODAY Network
Police vehicle accidents and the impact they have on communities across New York state are the focus of a new data journalism project in which Newhouse School students collaborate with reporters from the USA Today Network and Central Current. ing.
The first two articles in the ‘Driving Force’ investigative series were published in Newshouse last week following intensive reporting that began in June 2023. The first article covered Syracuse police crashes and emergency driving training for New York state troopers. More articles will be published over the coming months.
At the Newhouse School of Public Communication, Jodi Upton, Knight Chair in Data and Explanatory Journalism, and Nausheen Hussain, Assistant Professor of Magazine, News and Digital Journalism, led the project. Upton’s Three Data His Journalism Students in his class read hundreds of pages of documents, identifying the type of act, the date, the officers involved, and the resulting “data tagging.” We brought out details such as the discipline of the process.
The Driving Force coverage team will meet at Newhouse School in September 2023. (Photo by William Ramsey, USA Today Network)
Upton and Hussain said the exercise helped students understand the importance of how to convert government PDFs into data for analysis. The team examined records, court documents, and other state and police documents to identify individuals injured or killed in police vehicle accidents.
Overall, the reporting collaboration currently includes 35,000 records from 115 departments, from departments in large urban areas to departments in villages with only a few employees.
Upton and Hussain said the partnership is creating a police vehicle accident database for the public. We will be holding workshops to help the public and other journalists examine local police department documents and understand the impact police vehicle collisions have had on communities.
This study was supported by funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project. This project is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University Medill.
Read more about the report behind the Driving Force research project.
