D.C. Witness, a criminal justice data reporting nonprofit, already had plans to scale up their operations when the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 fueled a summer of protests pushing for accountability.
It was time to take action, said founder and publisher Amos Gelb.
“We were thinking ‘It’s our moment,’” Gelb said. “We do something that nobody else does. We bring transparency. Everybody’s talking about this stuff. Now is the time to expand this.”
So they looked to Baltimore to branch out; it was an hour up the road from their Washington, D.C. roots, and Charm City was contending with its own criminal justice issues.
After a soft launch in April 2021, Baltimore Witness spent the next few months acclimating to the city’s court system. Now, the nonprofit is gathering data to help news outlets and other organizations better contextualize Baltimore’s criminal justice system — from arrests through police investigations and court proceedings — and address its challenges.
While D.C. Witness tracks homicides, sexual assaults and domestic violence incidents, Baltimore Witness will focus on homicides and non-fatal shootings, said LaTrina Antoine, editor-in-chief of Baltimore Witness and D.C. Witness.
Antoine added that while the nonprofit plans to eventually expand its scope to cover other crimes, they wanted to start with the most prevalent crimes in each city.
Gelb, who has worked at CNN, ABC News, National Geographic, and others, said he founded D.C. Witness in 2015 after realizing some of the shortcomings in criminal justice reporting.
“When we started this in D.C., one of the things that I became really uncomfortable with was realizing that through my career … the traditional way of doing this means that I, as the journalist, get to decide which stories are worth covering, which lives are worth telling,” he said. “Who the hell am I to decide whether that person’s life is more worthy of being noted than yours?”
Antoine added that traditional news outlets “cherry pick which cases will receive the most fanfare.”
Gelb acknowledged that staffing limitations impede newsrooms’ ability to send reporters to cover every case. But he said Baltimore Witness will do a lot of the footwork of data collection so news outlets can more thoroughly investigate the criminal justice system.
D.C. Witness, and now Baltimore Witness, send reporters to all court proceedings to verify information collected from public data and report new information from courtrooms.
“The problem with data is that the official data that is made public is at best unreliable, at best out of date, at best incomplete,” Gelb said. “Sometimes, it’s just the fact that the organizations and the agencies are collecting data that supports their mission. There’s nothing wrong with it. That’s what they do. But sometimes, they are actually trying to obstruct it because they want the data to show something.”
Gelb added that many agencies rely on old technology, which makes it difficult to scrape public data.
But by marrying data science with shoe-leather reporting, he said Baltimore Witness seeks to improve transparency and accountability.
Every semester, Baltimore Witness and DC Witness each enlist a team of about 10-15 interns, as well as other staff members, to cover court proceedings from inside courtrooms, Antoine said.
Those interns include students studying a variety of disciplines, including journalism, law, political science, public policy and more.
“We’re not only getting and verifying valuable data, but also we have a big hand in actually teaching the students how to do hard news reporting, how to do data collection, how to do research and how to collect accurate information,” Antoine said.
The nonprofit then organizes data points in a three-tiered database: an “identity tier,” which includes biographical information about victims and suspects, such as race, age, birth date, and residence; a “policing tier,” which includes all data related to the police investigation; and an “adjudication tier,” which includes data tracking each case through the court process. Within those tiers, data are currently broken down into 107 categories.
Baltimore Witness will present the data via three avenues: a public forum that anyone can search; a more comprehensive distribution to news outlets and other organizations; and a paid section with a deeper examination of that data.
“If we have data that says there is a story there, you don’t have to waste your time,” he said. “You now have data that you can then go and build a story … Then you guys can do the criminal justice reporting that you couldn’t have done before because you don’t have the time or the skills or the manpower or what have you to do that kind of investigating.”
The website also plans to publish court calendars, allow users to easily search for all stories related to a particular case, and offer push notifications to update users about new data and information related to a case.
Antoine said the nonprofit is “non-biased and non-advocacy.” Their only mission is to assist local news outlets with providing a more complete, data-informed picture of criminal justice in Baltimore and D.C.
“We don’t have any stake in what the data says,” she said. “All we do is collect it and give it to others so that they can see the full picture. We’re not trying to skew anything. We’re just trying to show you what’s out there and what’s been verified and what’s come up in court.
Baltimore Witness will also help track data related to public policies and programs meant to curb violence, such as violence interruption initiatives.
Gelb said Baltimore Witness will give members of the public the tools and resources to hold city leaders accountable to reducing violence.
“The idea is that if we bring transparency and we bring accountability, the communities can respond and engage,” he said. “Because let’s face it, I don’t care what policies the city or state throws at homicides and violent crime. Unless the communities get engaged, unless it’s the communities that bring the change, unless the culture changes there, [nothing will change].”
Antoine said they also want to “alleviate the hopelessness” that some community members feel.
“We are giving them hope that change can occur through this data, through this new revolutionized model that we have developed,” she said.
Baltimore Witness doesn’t have a side, Gelb said. They “just want to see it get better,” and he said he has seen that Baltimore residents want that too.
“You Baltimoreans, you love your bloody city, warts and all, and you want it fixed,” he said. “The conversations that we are having with people, from victims rights groups to companies to other journalists to civic society organizations and beyond, is that Baltimore has a real commitment to fix its problem. That goes beyond the noise, which I think gives hope. What we hope that we can do is we can provide that missing piece.”
