Last updated November 09, 2020

This project was the central project of 2020 Graduate Research Fellow, Jasmine Martin. She worked closely with RCRC staff to develop this body of work.

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This mapping project spatially represents where incidents of LMPD gun violence has occurred across the City of Louisville and illuminates patterns of this particular form of police violence with an anti-oppression lens. 

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“Police in Louisville, Kentucky, released a nearly-blank incident report Wednesday from the night Breonna Taylor was fatally shot in her own apartment by officers. Despite the fact that the 26-year-old EMT was shot at least eight times during the no-knock search, the report listed Taylor's injuries as ‘none.’”

-- Audrey, McNamara, CBS News, Louisville police release Breonna Taylor incident report – it lists her injuries as "none," June 11, 2020

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The Root Cause Research Center acknowledges that police departments all over the country are regularly given platforms of authority and their perspective is centered in narratives. Respectable journalists, publications, and newsrooms have and will continue to center police narratives, despite rising national concerns and evidence that demonstrates their lack of credibility, clear conflicts of interest, long-buried history of violence and misconduct, connections to White Supremacy groups and ideology, continuous abuse of power, and so on. In acknowledging these unacceptable facts, we make a conscious decision in this project to decentralize that authority by prioritizing contextual analysis and relevant perspectives that were not developed by nor are in connection with LMPD.

 

Note: RCRC has made an intentional effort to challenge police power-reinforcing narratives by contextualizing police datasets and presenting these data as “LMPD Gun Violence and Killings.” By doing so, we reject abstracting the relationship between perpetrators of harm (LMPD), victims of harm (Civilians), and the harm itself (gun violence and killings).