The Terry Project

The youngest person to teach across five disciplines at Northwestern University, including teaching at its Pritzker School of Law, Karl T. Muth has written extensively on police interactions with the public. For example, his research in The National Lawyers Guild Review (the National Lawyers Guild was the first bar association open to Black attorneys) was part of a national conversation on police body cameras in 2016 and his most recent research on young Black men interacting with the police appears in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (2020). His comments on economic and racial inequality and other contemporary issues have been featured in a range of settings, from academic journals to HBO to the Oprah Winfrey Show. He holds J.D. and M.B.A. degrees, the latter with a concentration in Economics from the University of Chicago, and holds M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from the London School of Economics.

In Terry v. Ohio (1968) (Warren, C.J.), the Supreme Court promulgated a schematic for how it believed police officers and the public should interact; Terry is a stop-and-frisk case. The burdens and dangers of these interactions, however, have been borne disproportionately by Black communities and, most proximately, Black men. I am committed to providing lawmakers and policymakers the best possible information about roadside police interactions, which are by far the most dangerous encounters between Black men and the police. This information exists, but it requires an interdisciplinary research approach to collate and understand the data in a way that is digestible and actionable for policymakers who may be interested in the issue but unable to understand its scope and attributes. To understand the problem, we must understand its scope and attributes; The Terry Project will allow decision-makers to understand the problem and act having the best information available.

There are countless collisions between the police and the community, most of them, thankfully, uneventful. But the roadside encounter stands apart from the others statistically. It is the most dangerous scenario for police officers and also the most dangerous situation for Black people; and, among Black people, it is especially dangerous for young Black men (see Muth, K., J. Crim. L. & Criminology (2020)). In 2011 in Chicago alone there were 50 people shot in police-involved shootings and of those 23 died; this means 23 people never had the chance to provide a defense or prove their innocence before a court; in the years since 2011, 258 people have been shot by police in Chicago and 84 of those people died. The majority of these were roadside encounters and the majority of people shot were Black, though the city is only 32% Black. Sadly, the statistics for other major cities are only a bit better. But, without better data to draw upon, policymakers are not equipped to make the strongest arguments or to argue for the most effective policies. This is the problem The Terry Project seeks to solve.

The Terry Project is both a library and a resource, a trove and a system. More than a search engine for crime statistics, it is a centralized information clearinghouse for academics, activists, advocates, judges, lawyers, police oversight boards, politicians, and others to obtain the key statistics and narratives needed to understand the scope of the problem of roadside encounters between people-especially Black people-and the police escalating from conversation to violence. It contains a mixture of quantitative and qualitative information, from statistics on traffic stop outcomes to semi-structured interview transcripts contributed by researchers in the field to on-the-record testimony and victim impact statements that allow readers to understand more nuanced aspects of the interaction between the community and the police. The focus, however, is squarely on informing policymakers, whether they are chiefs of police, city councilpeople, or mayors; people in these positions have traditionally acted on their personal experiences or on impressions that are local and recent rather than comprehensive and longitudinal. The Terry Project lets people make decisions about roadside policing policy that are well-informed and that are carefully-crafted and evidence-based rather than simply recently-popular.

The Terry Project benefits everyone, but also serves three different groups:

1. Communitymembers, especially those in Black communities, and within those communities Black men, who are most likely to come in contact with police in roadside scenarios that escalate.
2. Decision-makers and policymakers, from chiefs of police to mayors, who often are well-intentioned but not well-informed, or informed with information specific to their recent histories or immediate locales.
3. Academics and researchers, who can contribute to an effort that allows people from different disciplines and regions to collaborate around the goal of making the best information available to decision-makers.

It is to everyone's benefit that policies be rooted in data rather than impression and that decisions be made in deliberative processes rather than turbulent moments.

I strongly believe the police are part of the community, but that interactions between the police (particularly uniformed police in the context of a roadside encounter) and the community are not the same as interactions between communitymembers. This inclusive view (that police are communitymembers) is reflected in my refusal to use the "police-civilian" dichotomy; the police are also civilians. But for our society to change its attitudes requires those who control the police (chiefs of police, mayors, etc.) to understand more fully this concept and to not build police-community relationships that are fundamentally adversarial and antagonistic.

As a mixed-race Dominican-American and longtime resident of the South Side of Chicago, thinking about the risks of roadside interactions with the police is more than an intellectual exercise. The consideration, beginning around 2013, of police body cameras as a way to examine police misbehavior was very interesting to me, but seemed to be viewed by some mayors and legislators as a solution rather than merely an investigative tool; I found this very concerning. Around the same time, my friend Nancy Jack was promoted from being a law clerk at the First District Appellate Court in Illinois to being a law clerk at the Illinois Supreme Court; I decided we'd be a great team to look into this issue further and write some of the first in-depth, diagnostic research on police body cameras. That research, published in the summer of 2016, grew into a lineage of research that continues today in my work at the law school regarding how and why police encounters become so violent and why these situations transform so negatively and so quickly, especially where young Black men are the people interacting with police.

My long-term goal is to live in a safer, more prosperous, and more cohesive South Side of Chicago and to help communities throughout America similar to the South Side in the problems that arise between police and the community (whether that means West Philadelphia or Arroyo Viejo). I've lived on the South Side since I was a teenager, leaving only for university studies. I love the place, the people, and the energy of the South Side; I have no intention of ever leaving. Like other South Siders, however, I've seen remarkable and negative changes in how our community is policed and how policy is made that affects our community. However, unlike many of my neighbors, as an academic with an interdisciplinary appointment, I have a unique privilege and opportunity to contribute to my community and other majority-Black urban communities by giving policymakers and decision-making entities the best possible information and the best possible understanding of the situation surrounding roadside law enforcement encounters that are too-often deadly for the members, and especially the young Black men, of our community.

I am uniquely qualified to do this work.

• I have been working on building both qualitative and quantitative understandings of policing dynamics since 2014 and have been continuously researching and publishing in this area since that time. I have a strong network of fellow researchers and allies in this effort.
• I have a unique mix of training and credentials to lead this research, including having formal training in economics and law and having sufficient financial literacy to interpret and understand resource allocations in cities, police departments, and other relevant entities.
• I have the lived experience of having been a mixed-race Dominican-American resident of the South Side of Chicago, having been stopped over two dozen times by police, and having seen first-hand the terrible consequences of misunderstandings between people and the police.
• I have an interdepartmental appointment at Northwestern University with research as my primary responsibility. Few hold interdepartmental appointments and I'm one of very few that has a minimal teaching load (2 courses per year) and is primarily focused on interdisciplinary research.

A mixed-race Dominican-American, I struggled with which opportunities to pursue. I studied law at the undergraduate level on the island of Curacao, which was then part of the Netherlands. I then earned J.D. and M.B.A. degrees in America and deeply enjoyed my time at the University of Chicago. After the University of Chicago, I joined the doctoral program at the London School of Economics. After my Ph.D., I joined the Emerging Leaders program at Harvard's Kennedy School and hadn't been in Boston more than an hour before I was stopped by police. This was nothing new for me. What was new, however, was the officer's attitude; he was convinced I was up to no good. While I was on my knees unloading and inventorying my backpack on the sidewalk while the officers told jokes to each other, I looked up at one of them and asked, "What would change your mind about me in this situation?" He was surprised. It began an interesting conversation and, in some ways, inspired this work. I do not believe police are the enemy, but I believe they will only see the community as human if we can have a conversation as fellow humans.

I led an effort that included over 100 researchers in East Africa in 2010-12 that focused on learning about the needs of entrepreneurs in Northern Uganda (Acholiland and Lango Region). The work required me to get out of my comfort zone physically (including operating near the equator in 110F+ heat), linguistically (learning Acholi and Lango and using them daily in my interviews with local people), and culturally (living for thirty months in a place very different from the places I'd lived: the Caribbean, the South Side of Chicago, and London). In that research, I had to recruit and manage a variety of people who experienced their own challenges and had to make sure they were able to communicate and empathize with African entrepreneurs, vital to gathering actionable and pertinent information. Over a 30-month period, I successfully lived and worked in the region alongside others from many different countries and many different home cultures to undertake one of the most ambitious research projects that had been attempted in the region at the time.

I am a researcher at Northwestern University and hold a separate appointment at Northwestern's Pritzker School of Law, where I've been researching issues related to criminal justice and policing for more than five years, beginning with research on how cell phone footage and body cameras can help monitor policing behavior in 2015 (published as Watching the Watchers: Monitoring Police Performance as Public Servants, 73 NLG Review 23 (2016)). The Terry Project is research that I plan to conduct as part of my ongoing work at Northwestern University on these important issues.

The interactions between the community and the police have generally been focused on particular events, an n=1, diagnostic, overall qualitative approach. These descriptive types of research are important and certainly individual events stand out in the public's perception of misbehavior or excessive use of force in moments when police and the community have come in contact: Rodney King, Michael Brown, George Floyd, and less than fifteen minutes from my neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, Laquan McDonald shot and killed at 40th and Pulaski. The Terry Project's innovation focuses on expanding this conversation to understand that each episode of violent interaction between the police and the community is not merely an n=1 event, but part of a larger narrative, part of a broader taxonomy, and part of an epidemic-scale problem. The Terry Project achieves this by indexing large-scale data on roadside interactions (the most common and most dangerous type of interaction between a communitymember and a police officer) and making it available to policymakers and others in a format that is searchable, digestible, and actionable even for people and agencies and organizations that are not equipped or resourced to gather, assemble, and utilize this information themselves, e.g., most police departments and municipalities. As an additional benefit, The Terry Project makes its data and methods available to the public through an open-source-first approach that invites communitymembers to be involved as contributors and curators of the information their elected and appointed officials may act upon.

The Terry Project works from the first principle that legislators, mayors, chiefs of police, and police officers are first communitymembers, and that they generally (if not all individually) have the best interests of the community at heart as they choose their behavior, design their policies, and carry out their jobs. There may well be police officers and even senior leaders at the municipality level that are racist, that do not believe in the advancement of their fellow communitymembers, or who simply want to cause havoc or violence; The Terry Project's view is these are minority views that may be addressable but that are not directly addressed by our work. Instead, this work targets well-intentioned public servants who are interested in these issues but not well-informed, who may see incidents of violence as separate events rather than part of a continuous pattern, who may not understand how policy levers available to them can be adjusted to positively influence the outcomes of roadside encounters between police and the community. The goal is to have The Terry Project be a central, credible, and important resource in the decision-making of these individuals.

The current work of The Terry Project includes a variety of publications to inform judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, pro se defendants, jailhouse lawyers (a major audience for the NLG Review, where we've published resources on using police body cameras and cameraphone videos of police as evidence), journalists reporting about criminal justice matters, law students, and others as to the realities people face when interacting with the police and what might be done to make interactions between communitymembers and the police more peaceful and, specifically, what can be done to reduce as much as possible the number of roadside encounters that are deadly. The current number of people who benefit include millions of people who benefit from information already distributed, including the roughly 600,000 police officers in the U.S., the roughly 40,000 attorneys involved in criminal law (of 400,000 attorneys that form the American Bar Association, roughly ten percent are currently or previously involved in a criminal practice), hundreds of mayors and policymakers, and the over two million people incarcerated in the United States. This figure does not include the millions more who have been stopped by the police since our first publication in 2016, and each of those encounters could have been a deadly incident-especially if the communitymember involved is a young Black man and the police officer is white. By moving through our research roadmap more quickly and publishing more pieces that garner mainstream attention, we hope to help millions more, including policymakers.

Ingesting data from a variety of nationwide and local sources and making this data not only accessible to, but useful to, policymakers is the central goal of The Terry Project. This includes indexing information from the twenty largest urban areas in the United States, some of which include multiple municipalities (like greater Los Angeles). To accomplish this, The Terry Project will utilize a mixture of graduate student and hired professional labor to attack the problem of providing actionable and understandable data science, statistical/econometric, historical, and demographic/anthropological/ethnographic information surrounding both the class of events being analyzed (contact between the police and communitymembers) and specific events that may be avoided or prevented with sound policy choices-in particular, deadly encounters between young Black men and the police. The Terry Project, within five years, will inform substantial policy changes from mayors, chiefs of police, and others that are sensitive to the needs of Black communities and protective of the safety of Black men in ways that current policies are not.

While our recent research and papers have focused on Chicago and Washington, D.C., with additional funding we could hire additional graduate students, an additional data scientist, and a UI/UX visualization person to accelerate our ingestion of important data from other cities and to give a nationwide picture of what is happening in urban policing, which roadside outcomes between Black men and police are resulting from which sets of policies, and what incremental policy improvements are available to which policymakers to save lives-both in the community and on the police force. The primary barrier is funding. While I have been able to use money from Northwestern to fund much of the research thusfar, external funding will be needed to push into the next stage of research and hire people to assist me with building out a more comprehensive and navigable resource.

I have substantial experience building data science teams and analysis teams and organizing large amounts of information in digestible and actionable forms. For over a decade, I've built research efforts that have led to peer-reviewed, state-of-the-art research across a variety of fields. I also have invented systems for searching large databases (see, e.g., U.S. Patents 9,594,809 & 9,262,526) that have been cited by IBM and Yahoo! in those companies' patent applications. However, to do the work that The Terry Project must do next, I cannot do all the work myself with the resources available from Northwestern University. That is the context in which I apply for this Prize. My hope is to hire two or three graduate students, a UI/UX and data visualization expert, and a data scientist who can supplement my own data science work in this area; together, we can organize data from many more cities and help legislators, policymakers, mayors, leaders of community organizations, and others understand the scope of the problem, the types of available policy choices, and the nature of the trade-offs between those choices with an evidence-based, impartial source for that information that decision-makers can use both to inform themselves and to advocate for (and justify) their decisions to others.

The Terry Project will be working closely with the Crime Lab (part of the Urban Labs project) at the University of Chicago, my colleagues at Northwestern University, and collaborators inside the justice system (including recent retirees, like Nancy Jack, Law Clerk of the Illinois Supreme Court and James A. Shapiro, a sitting judge in Cook County, Illinois, which causes and supervises the pre-trial incarceration of more young Black men then any other court in the country). I have already worked with many of these people, some for more than a decade. Together, we have already produced the body of research that will form the basis for The Terry Project's next phase of work.

The goal is to build a community-maintained resource that allows policy-makers and other decision-makers to make evidence-based decisions looking at both quantitative and qualitative information about police encounters with the community, and with an emphasis on showcasing data on roadside encounters ("Terry stops"), the most dangerous scenario in terms of communitymembers killed during contact with the police. Currently, this resource is being built slowly with money received from Northwestern University. The goal is simply to finish building the resource, and additional funding will accelerate this by allowing me to hire people to help me. Once the resource is built, it will be community-maintained and free to all, much as Wikipedia and similar resources are maintained. The Terry Project is not revenue-producing, its dividend is instead in the form of a safer and more equal society governed by sensible, evidence-based policies in which we can all live more safely, more peacefully, and more prosperously.

This work has thusfar been funded completely with funds I've received from Northwestern University. However, with this Prize money, we could complete this work and create a sustainable, community-maintained resource that is credible, accurate, and well-maintained for communitymembers, decision-makers, and researchers to use in future work. The money from the Prize, combined with money from Northwestern, is sufficient complete The Terry Project's envisioned resource for those making decisions about how to prevent police violence toward communitymembers and hand it over to community management (as has been successfully done with many Wiki-based troves of information) with minimal long-term administration costs once it is built.

The Elevate Prize would allow me to work on The Terry Project with more of my time, to prioritize these important efforts around social equality and access to justice over other faculty demands on my time, and to recruit bright students and research assistants (preferring those who self-identify as members of affected communities) and offer them living wages. Specifically, it would allow me to hire two or three additional graduate students to help with The Terry Project, to hire a UI/UX data visualization expert, and to hire a data scientist to supplement my own work on the data available. With this team, we could gather the data needed, organize it properly, attack the remaining problems in making it easily viewed and searched, and empower decision-makers across the country to make choices that benefit their communities, protect their communitymembers, and make policing safer-especially in the context of roadside contact between communitymembers and police.

My goal is to hire two or three additional graduate students to help with The Terry Project, to hire a UI/UX data visualization expert, and to hire a data scientist to supplement my own work on the data available. I do not plan to draw a salary, so all funds would go toward completing The Terry Project and making it a credible, important resource for making policing safer for everyone.