Sankofa keeps a record of documented harm to Black communities in America, and a map of where people can still build a life. A record is only worth what its method is worth — so the method is published here in full, including the parts that are weak. If something on this site is wrong, there is a route on this page to change it, and it is meant to be used.
The most important thing on this page, and the thing most likely to be misread if it is not said first.
A city with many entries is not a more dangerous city. It is a better-documented one. Large metros generate more records, have more newsrooms covering them, and have more people in them. A small town with one entry and a large city with forty cannot be compared on those numbers, and this site will never rank them that way.
The same applies to institutions. A hospital that appears twice is a hospital where two documented reports named it. It is not the second-worst hospital in a league table, and there is no league table.
An entry has to clear all four. If it clears three, it does not go in.
A government or law-enforcement record, an established dataset, court filings, or reporting from an identifiable outlet. A source that cannot be linked or named is not a source. Social-media claims are not sources on their own — they are a reason to go looking for one.
Something has to have been recorded by someone with a reason to record it accurately: a case number, a filing, an investigation, a published account. Rumour and secondhand summary do not qualify no matter how widely repeated.
A record with no location cannot go on a map without inventing one. Where a location is approximate, that is stated rather than smoothed over.
That is the scope. It is a deliberately narrow archive, and narrowing it is what keeps it accurate.
Every source, and — more usefully — what each one cannot tell you. A dataset used outside what it can support is how good data produces false conclusions.
The US Department of Justice's National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. The authoritative public record for missing-person cases in the United States.
A continuously maintained national database of fatal police shootings, compiled from local reporting, public records and agency statements.
Filed complaints, consent decrees, agency findings and settlements. Used for institution-level entries.
Documented historical violence and displacement — the entries that give the map its depth in time rather than only its present.
Used only in the Where to move section, which is a separate question from the record and is kept separate on purpose.
How a number on this site is produced, so anyone can check whether it means what they think it means.
Not one count per article, per victim or per agency involved. Where several sources describe the same event, it remains one entry with several sources attached.
No per-100,000 figures, no population adjustment, no ranking of places against each other. The data is not collected uniformly enough for a rate to be honest, and a dishonest rate is more damaging than no rate.
A single report is kept with the case, where it belongs. The two-report threshold exists so that one contested account cannot, by itself, attach a name to a map.
This distinction matters more than it looks. A city where cases occurred is not an accused party. A database the records came from is not an accused party. Both are listed apart from named institutions so the two can never be read as the same thing.
Every figure reflects the current view, not the whole archive. Narrow the filters and the counts fall — that is the counter working, not the record shrinking.
Choices made against the project's own interest, because an archive of harm can very easily become a source of it.
Nothing on this site tracks where any person is now. Location on a map refers to where a documented event occurred, not to where anyone lives, works or can be found.
Where a name appears it is because it is already in a filing, a charge or published reporting. Sankofa does not introduce names into the world.
Small-area detail is coarsened where a precise pin plus a date would effectively name a private person who has not been named elsewhere.
The atlas and this page make zero external requests — no fonts, no libraries, no tiles, no measurement. On a site about surveillance, reading it should not be surveilled.
The part that makes the rest of it a record instead of an accusation.
Anyone can ask for a correction — the person or family involved, a named institution, a journalist, or someone who simply spotted an error. You do not need standing and you do not need a lawyer. Requests are read by a person, not a form.
Stated here rather than discovered by someone else later.
Places with more newsrooms, more active agencies and better record-keeping produce more entries. That means the map partly shows where documentation happens, not only where harm happens — and the quietest areas on it are the ones to be most careful about.
It is a growing record, not a census. Any claim of the form “this is how much of X there is” cannot be supported by this dataset, and no page here makes one.
They were produced by different record-keeping systems with different incentives. Counting across eras produces a number with no meaning.
Every one of them is named in section 03 with what it cannot tell you, because inheriting a dataset means inheriting its blind spots.
Sankofa has no funder, no newsroom and no legal department behind it. That is why the method is published, the sources are named and the corrections route is open — those are the substitutes for institutional weight, and they only work if they are used.
Cite the source, not Sankofa. Every entry names where it came from — quote that. This site is a finding aid that points at public records; the records are the evidence, and they are what will hold up.
Researchers, journalists and organisations working in this area are welcome to get in touch about the underlying data, including the parts that are not published. Questions about the method are the most useful mail this project receives.