Several years in the making, “Lethal Restraint” is an investigation of great ambition and in the finest tradition of public service journalism.
Every day, police rely on common tactics that, unlike guns, are meant to stop people without killing them. Yet this “less-lethal force” can still be a recipe for death, especially when officers misuse physical holds like prone restraint or Tasers and other weapons.
Unlike shootings, these deaths are much easier to explain away as something other than related to law enforcement – as a medical emergency, for example, as Minneapolis police first tried to do in the case of George Floyd. These are the deaths that are the hardest to find.
The Associated Press, in collaboration with two universities and FRONTLINE (PBS), set out to document as many as possible — across the U.S., over a decade’s time.
The investigation was both wide and deep. Every case required primary documentation, and through 7,000 public records act requests reporters amassed an unprecedented repository of documents and police video, much of it never seen publicly.
The resulting project, which launched in March and will publish through 2024, already has delivered not just ground-breaking reporting that had immediate impact, but also a new and unprecedented public-facing database.
Database: Details of all 1,036 cases the investigation documented are available to the public in a searchable database. The database can be explored not just by name and location, but also by theme, race/ethnicity, geography, gender, etc. Each fact has been cited to a specific document or video through a rigorous fact-checking process; prior news coverage and lawsuit allegations were not used.
Documentary: A FRONTLINE film that documents AP reporters’ pursuit of the stories they told aired April 30 on PBS.
Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism: “Lethal Restraint” was a textbook collaboration among AP and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism programs at the University of Maryland and Arizona State University. Over several semesters, both graduate and undergraduate students at each Howard Center not only learned reporting skills, but also produced bylined stories and photographs that moved on AP wires, as well as data analysis that propelled the investigation’s findings.
Stories: With several installments to come, “Lethal Restraint” already includes revelatory stories, including the extent that officers violate best safety practices, as well as how the medical syringe has become a go-to tool in many more deadly encounters than the public had understood.
Localization: As a news cooperative, the AP takes pride in offering exclusive reporting to bolster the news report of member newspapers and other outlets, where staff cuts have in many cases limited the amount of digging and accountability work reporters can do. In the case of “Lethal Restraint,” that meant sharing exclusive body-camera video & other records in dozens of cases that had never been reported before publicly. News outlets across the nation used the records that AP provided them to do their own reporting on cases of local interest, publishing the results on their front pages or in extended evening news segments.
