Demo Watch

Researchers at Goodly Labs and New York University are trying to understand why some encounters between police and protesters turn violent while others remain peaceful. We are looking for citizen scientists who will help us analyze newspaper articles and identify the different actions that police and protesters took and in what sequence.

We have collected over 8,000 articles on “Occupy Wall Street” – a movement that set up encampments and organized protests in hundreds of cities in the U.S. and around the world against growing wealth inequality in 2011. While in some cities, the police used significant force against protesters, in others, events remained peaceful.

With your help, we will identify factors that led to uses of force in the past to help avoid it in the future. We also hope our findings will help us better understand police responses to other movements, such as Black Lives Matter.