Started in 2015, American Witness was born out of a goal to bring transparency to local criminal justice systems.
As our coverage of violent crime in Washington, D.C. expanded, we quickly realized that the balkanized and convoluted local criminal justice process provided remarkably little insight as to what was going on in cases and the data that was publicly available was rarely timely, at best inaccurate, often just wrong.
So we developed a methodology for capturing data on violent crime, starting by collecting official data, validating it and then adding to it. All of that was done with multiple fact checking steps to ensure our accuracy.
The result, data and context that for the first time ‘linked the dots’ across the fractured criminal justice system.
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Growing outcry for greater accountability from the criminal justice system led us to expand into our second city, Baltimore, MD, applying and adjusting our now tried-and-tested methodology to another local justice system. Our unique dataset designed to accommodate quirks in local criminal justice systems is growing rapidly with well over 4 million data points on violent crime.
But we have also come to realize transparency and great data are not enough. So we are developing unique products that leverage our unique data to create solutions to specific problems that plague local systems. To do this unique work, we brought on data scientists, software developers and specialists to work with our journalistic core to build our methodology into a scalable model that can be used for any crime in any jurisdiction across the country.
What makes us different from the other innovations in criminal justice technology, much of it using AI, is that those are passive technologies that just process unreliable public data. It is true that you can’t fix what you can’t count. We are the only ones doing the counting.
We are excited for our future as a data/technology company that is NOT trying to reform whole systems but rather offer solutions to specific issues so that local criminal justice systems work better.