Community engagement & action
Residents use public records training to seek gun violence data
2/2022
Almost 600 people have completed a seven-day course on public records sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative with help from Cleveland Documenters. The course offered a daily, bite-size “micro-lesson” via text message along with
exercises to help users apply what they had learned. One group in Cleveland — parents whose children were victims of gun violence — has used the course to request local homicide data, and they hope to present a map of every homicide in their county to the City of Cleveland’s safety committee. “There’s this notion that people are apathetic,” said Rachel Dissell, a Cleveland-based journalist who designed the course with editor and educator Linda Austin. “But the more we work with people, it’s more like people are frustrated. ... Really, people want to solve problems — they don’t know how.”
exercises to help users apply what they had learned. One group in Cleveland — parents whose children were victims of gun violence — has used the course to request local homicide data, and they hope to present a map of every homicide in their county to the City of Cleveland’s safety committee. “There’s this notion that people are apathetic,” said Rachel Dissell, a Cleveland-based journalist who designed the course with editor and educator Linda Austin. “But the more we work with people, it’s more like people are frustrated. ... Really, people want to solve problems — they don’t know how.”