Join Tamara K. Nopper for an urgent discussion of the politics, history, and methods of counting crime—and who benefits from crime data.

Politicians, pundits, and mainstream media are claiming crime is going up and some are blaming defund the police campaigns. But how we measure crime is a socially constructed, political process and more data literacy on this topic can be useful in this political moment. In this educational lecture we will learn about some of the history of counting crime during the post-Emancipation period, who has pushed for crime data to be collected, some of the major data sources (including the samples and methods), and how crime data is deployed for various purposes. 

Part of the proceeds from this event will go to the National Bail Fund Network. 

Speaker: Tamara K. Nopper is a sociologist, writer, and editor. She is the editor of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, a book of Mariame Kaba’s writings and interviews (Haymarket Books), and researcher and writer of several data stories for Colin Kaepernick’s Abolition for the People series. She is a Fellow at Data for Progress, an Affiliate of The Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies, and a member of the inaugural cohort of the NYU Institute for Public Interest Technology. She is also an incoming 2021-2022 Faculty Fellow at Data & Society.

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This event is sponsored by Interrupting Criminalization, Survived & Punished, Community Resource Hub for Safety & Accountability, 18 Million Rising (18MR), Critical Resistance, Civil Rights Corps, and Haymarket Books.