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In Puerto Rico, 3.1 per 1 million people die each year from police use of force. Among residents from poor and racially diverse neighborhoods, that rate is 4.8 per 1 million, compared with 2.2 per 1 million in higher-income, white neighborhoods. Moreover, among people experiencing poverty in Puerto Rico, those from Afro-Caribbean neighborhoods are more vulnerable to excessive use of force by police than their counterparts in white neighborhoods.
Whereas research on racial disparities in policing in the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia has been widely reported, less is known about these disparities in Puerto Rico, where understandings of race and ethnicity are particularly nuanced. Kilómetro Cero published a report on this subject, Licencia para Matar (“license to kill”), the first to statistically explore inequitable patterns and biases in police killings on the island.
Kilómetro Cero works with directly affected communities to hold police accountable by publishing testimonies from community members who are survivors of police violence, maintaining a public repository of grievances made toward the police (including those regarding police interactions), and training community members on their rights. It is also part of a larger movement of organizations, the Police Reform Community Working Group, working to end police violence.
In an effort to increase transparency around police use of force in Puerto Rico, Kilómetro Cero requested use-of-force reports filed by the Puerto Rico Police Department. Although denied access, Kilómetro Cero took its case to the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico and was granted access to the police department’s use-of-force reports since 2014. The police began handing over the PDF files in 2021.
How Kilómetro Cero Leveraged Catalyst Grant Funding
As part of the 2022 Microsoft Catalyst Grant Program, Kilómetro Cero set out to create the largest use-of-force database of its kind in Puerto Rico, with the goal of constructing an open-access database enabling anyone to trace information about use-of-force incidents and the officers involved to investigate racial disparities in policing. As of this writing, Kilómetro Cero is in the process of auditing the effectiveness of its database in preparation for publication.
Partnering with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, Kilómetro Cero used Azure Form Recognizer to extract, code, and analyze machine-readable data from over 8,000 scanned reports of police use-of-force incidents that occurred from 2014 to 2021. They then cross-checked the information from those reports with official police databases and internal documentation of their own—including their Evidencia la Valencia (“Evidence the Violence”) database, a documentation tool they used to collect testimonies and stories in which police or public security agents intervened in violent, discriminatory, or irregular ways with citizens—to monitor whether the police complied with the order to provide all of their reports on use-of-force incidents.
To investigate how race and class disparities factor into police violence, Kilómetro Cero measured rates of potentially lethal use-of-force incidents across neighborhoods of different socioeconomic status and racial composition. Its initial findings showed that police use-of-force incidents that were rated to be “potentially lethal” occurred at higher rates in predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods, independently of income levels.
In addition to its work with the use-of-force reports, Kilómetro Cero offered educational workshops, including community mediation workshops, on public safety to help community members reflect on handling conflict situations without police intervention. Overall, Kilómetro Cero used the Catalyst grant to improve its capacity to extract and analyze police use-of-force data. It plans to continue to use these skills in its fight for equity in the criminal legal system.
The Catalyst Grant Program is a collaboration between the Urban Institute and the Microsoft Justice Reform Initiative to help nonprofit organizations use data and technology to advance racial equity and reform in the criminal legal system. Visit the Catalyst Grant Program Insights page for more resources and stories about the grantees.