An investigative project of rare ambition, “Lethal Restraint” sought to do what the federal government has struggled for years to accomplish — offer the public the most extensive accounting ever compiled of deaths after police used “less-lethal force,” meant to stop people without killing them. Filing 7,000 public record requests across the country, the reporters netted hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and hundreds of hours of police video, and the database that they built documented more than 1,000 cases that cut across socioeconomic, racial and geographic boundaries.
The reporting is unrivaled. While media track police shootings, and private groups track police killings overall, no one has focused so deeply and so broadly on deaths that don’t involve a firearm — deaths that are harder to find. Despite obstacles, reporters identified hundreds of cases that had not been publicly reported on before.
The question then became how to present both the database — on a topic of deep national interest — and the stories behind the cases.
Our project’s “Visual Story” is an immersive scrolling experience that uses police video and audio, interviews and data visualizations to present cases and stories in a narrative chapter-style experience. The viewer sees several key cases up close to understand how police encounters can play out and why these deaths sometimes go unnoticed. A 3D visualization of cases is interspersed throughout the story — a visual and narrative device to communicate the scope and scale of the deaths and a way to bring the viewer deep into a single case and then pull them back to a broad overview of all cases. This visualization is used throughout the “Visual Story” experience and forms the basis of a fully interactive database of cases.
The audience can also navigate to the interactive, searchable database of over a thousand cases that involve deaths after police used tactics such as physical holds, Tasers or body blows. The audience can filter cases by race, location and common themes that appear across many cases. Each person is represented by a case card — a published record of the police encounter and the types of force that were used.
The “Lethal Restraint” project website pulls together the “Visual Story” experience, the interactive database of cases, related articles and a related documentary — all in a custom web application that is optimized across all devices, including mobile.
