Insights from the Tracking (In)justice Project

Last year, 61 people died in interactions with the police or in incarceration facilities across the country. Historically, we lacked means for systematically tracking even basic details of the circumstances around these deaths, including rudimentary demographic information (who was killed?), geographic (where were they killed?), as well as investigative outcomes (were any officials held responsible?), and journalistic coverage (has there been any reporting about this)? With a team of researchers spanning Carleton, McGill, Queens, UofT, and UBC, we are developing the Tracking (In)Justice project to systematically and transparently catalogue the circumstances around these deaths, drawing on a mix of sources from government releases, news reporting, and meticulous case-by-case fact checking, tracking these critical details from 2000 onwards.

Speakers

Farhan Samir

Farhan Samir is a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Computer Science department at the University of Toronto. He earned his PhD at the University of British Columbia, where his work was supported by an NSERC Doctoral Fellowship, a UBC Public Scholars Initiative award, and the 2024-25 UBC Department of Statistics Award in Data Science. He was formerly a researcher at NVIDIA, Amazon Science, and the Allen Institute for AI.