Police Shootings Database, The Washington Post

The Washington Post’s Police Shootings Database is a nearly decade-old, Pulitzer-prize winning journalism project in which researchers compile details of officer-involved, fatal shootings.

The project is powered by an internal Django application deployed on our cloud infrastructure. It provides an interface for researchers to enter evidence of officer-involved shootings, including source URLs that are automatically archived to preserve research evidence. The system also automates the process of publishing the open data to GitHub.

My team re-engineered the backend system to be more reliable, extensible, and scalable.

I worked on both the application development and the deployment of the system, as well as helping to shape the product scope.

One of my key contributions was building a comprehensive test suite to prevent any data from being mutated during migration from the old system to the new system. This avoided bugs that could have led to errors in published data.

More links

• Pulitzer Prize-winning Fatal Force Database updated with federal IDs of police departments involved in fatal shootings
• Inside the Washington Post’s police shootings database: An oral historytomates the process of publishing the open data to GitHub.

My team re-engineered the backend system to be more reliable, e