We The Protesters (WTP) is a left-of-center policing policy organization associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. ¹ WTP was founded in 2014 following the police-involved shooting death of Michael Brown and associated violent protests in Ferguson, Missouri. ² Prominent activist DeRay Mckesson is the president and co-founder of We the Protesters. ³

WTP’s founders call it the first “digital civil rights movement” ⁴ with a goal of creating a new political community in the United States focused on black struggle due to perceived systemic, structural, and continuous pattern of “police brutality.” ⁵ WTP threatens to protest “until black lives are valued,” ⁶ and believes it has the chance to eradicate racism and its impacts within 30 years because by then “people of color will be the majority in America.” ⁷ It also holds an “affirmative vision of equity and justice,” and is ready to mobilize and organize for “social justice, centered on black struggle and rooted in justice.” ⁸

WTP’s online resources and activist content includes the tracking incidents of police use of force across the United States, ⁹ an interactive map with these incidents which uses vague definitions, ^{10 11} police union contract analysis, ¹² and a list of far-left demands from student organizations across the United States. ¹³

Its most well-known project is Campaign Zero, which went viral on social media in the wake of the police custody death of George Floyd for its “#8CantWait“ policy solutions infographic which demanded 8 left-wing policing changes. ¹⁴

WTP was a part of fashion brand Glossier’s pledge to donate $500,000 to various organizations in 2020 ¹⁵ and received a $5,000 grant from the left-of-center Marguerite Casey Foundation in 2019. ¹⁶ In 2018, WTP reported $242,333 of contributions and grants. ¹⁷ WTP is associated with other left-wing activist organizations Campaign Zero ¹⁸ and StayWoke. ¹⁹

Founding and Leadership

We the Protesters was founded by left-of-center activists Samuel Sinyangwe, DeRay Mckesson, and Johnetta Elzie in August 2014 following the controversial police-shooting death of Michael Brown. The organization first launched Campaign Zero and “Mapping Police Violence,” a data project to track all incidents of police violence. ²⁰ In addition to curating a geographical map of the use of force by police in America, Mapping Police Violence also features the Police Accountability Tool, which narrows down incidents to specific policing jurisdictions and victims. Soon after, We the Protesters added a suite of other small projects to its website, including activist toolkits and easy means for people to contact their local and state legislators to advocate for left-of-center police reforms. ²¹

In June 2020, following the police-custody death of George Floyd, We the Protesters launched the #8CantWait campaign. ²² #8CantWait picked up steam on social media but was critiqued harshly as performative activism. An article from the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, noted that even before #8CantWait was created, police departments in major cities had already adopted most of its policy prescriptions. ²³

Activities

WTP’s mission is to create a new political community in the United States focused on Black struggle and rooted in justice due to a perceived systemic, structural, and continuous pattern of “police brutality.” ²⁴ Its founders call it the first “digital civil rights movement” and the key to the next generation of digital tools for the Black Lives Matter movement. ²⁵

Aside from the tools that redirect users to different campaign websites – Campaign Zero, the Police Use of Force Project, and Mapping Police Violence — much of the We the Protesters website appears to be unchanged from early 2015. The activist toolkits, for example, only show footage and pictures from the 2014 Ferguson protests. Its “Executive Summary,” expressly intended to be “a living document… [that] will be updated on an on-going basis” had not been updated since 2014 as of early November 2020. ²⁶

WTP threatens to protest “until black lives are valued” ²⁷ and believes it has the chance to eradicate racism and its impacts within 30 years because by then “people of color will be the majority in America.” ²⁸ WTP holds an “affirmative vision of equity and justice” and is ready to mobilize and organize for “social justice, centered on black struggle and rooted in justice.” ²⁹

Police Use of Force Project

One of WTP’s main online projects is the Police Use of Force Project, which addresses whether police officers are required to warn suspects prior to using their firearm. ³⁰ This program rates police forces on their respective use of force policies and lists “failures” to limit police use of force. Their list includes: lack of a requirement to de-escalate, allowing officers to “choke or strangle” civilians, lack of requirement for officers to intervene in situations involving other officers, lack of a ban for shooting at moving vehicles, lack of a verbal warning requirement for officers to discharge their firearm, and a lack of a requirement to report each use or threatened use of force. ³¹

Mapping Police Violence

One of WTP’s first projects was the “Mapping Police Violence Project,” ³² which uses interactive graphs and charts to track police-involved deaths and violent incidents across the United States. ³³ This map, which focuses on the deaths of African Americans during interactions with police but also includes information about other races when available, is controversial because it incorporates data outside of official Federal Bureau of Investigations and Centers for Disease Control information. ³⁴ The project’s mapping uses different data sets than the Washington Post’s police shootings database and relies heavily on crowdsourced data. The map also includes death via chokehold, baton, taser, or other means in its count. ³⁵

Mapping Police Violence has been criticized for distorting its data, as academic correspondences published by The Lancet, one of the oldest weekly peer-reviewed general medical journals, pointed out several major faults of the project. ³⁶

In the database, police incidents of violence that involve “citizens holding a toy weapon (eg, pellet gun, air rifle) or ‘alleged to be armed by the police, but multiple independent witnesses maintain the person was unarmed,’” are coded as incidents of police violence against unarmed civilians. The authors of the Lancet article noted that “toy guns are difficult to distinguish from real guns in a matter of split seconds, which is why databases compiled by The Guardian and The Washington Post label such cases as specifically involving toy guns.” The authors also checked the data in Mapping Police Violence against databases published by The Guardian and The Washington Post, and found that more than a third of its “unarmed black shootings… were, in fact, not unarmed according to the other databases.” ³⁷

Police Union Contract Project

WTP’s website hosts links to the Police Union Contract Project, which analyzes police union contracts in over 80 metropolitan areas and identifies the ways in which activists believe police union contracts in these areas “make it difficult to hold police accountable for misconduct.” ³⁸ This portal also identifies perceived police union political influence in California. ³⁹

“The Demands”

WTP’s website hosts a list of nationwide far-left demands from student organizations on 80 different university campuses to serve as a resource for activists called “The Demands.” ⁴⁰ Black Liberation Collective’s national demands are a part of this list and include free tuition for African American and Native American students, divestment from prisons, and proportional representation for African American students and staff that is equivalent to the demographic makeup of the country. ⁴¹

Protest Signs

WTP’s website hosts a page showcasing images of protesters holding signs at various protests around the United States. Featured signs on this page include messages such as: “Cops Kill Kids,” “Stop Huntin My People,” You don’t need a license to kill. You just need a badge,” “Out of the streets fascist police,” “lock up kkkiller cops,” “white silence is violence,” “season’s bleedings,” “the system is guilty,” and “unf**k America.” ⁴²

Funding

In 2020, WTP received an undisclosed amount of money from fashion brand Glossier as a part of Glossier’s pledge to donate $500,000 to Black Lives Matter, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Equal Justice Initiative, the Marsha P Johnson Institute, and We the Protesters. ⁴³ That same year, WTP was one of 1,096 organizations to receive a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Hartford. ⁴⁴

In 2019, WTP received a $5,000 grant from the left-of-center Marguerite Casey Foundation  ⁴⁵ and $18,000 from MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger. ⁴⁶

In 2018, WTP reported $242,333 of contributions and grants. ⁴⁷ WTP reported receiving grants totaling $175,927 in 2017 and $241,809 in 2016, respectively. ^{48 49}

Leadership

DeRay Mckesson is the president and co-founder of We the Protesters. ⁵⁰ Mckesson was the center of social media controversy surrounding his actions after the 2015 Charleston church shooting, ⁵¹ is a Teach for America alum, the founder and co-editor of the Ferguson Protester Newsletter, ⁵² and was identified by MSNBC as a “co-founder and arguably best-known member of the Black Lives Matter movement.” ⁵³

Mckesson has been involved in Democratic Party political circles since WTP’s founding. He was a part of public listening sessions for President Obama’s policing taskforce; ⁵⁴ met with unsuccessful Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2015; ⁵⁵ ran an unsuccessful mayoral campaign in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2016 that called for a repeal the law enforcement officers’ bill of rights; ^{56 57} and met with then-President Obama in 2016 alongside political activist Al Sharpton, NAACP president Cornell Brooks, then-Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), and Attorney General Loretta Lynch to discuss civil rights concerns. ⁵⁸

Mckesson co-founded WTP and far-left activist organization Campaign Zero with Samuel Sinyangwe ⁵⁹ and Johnetta Elzie. ⁶⁰ Sinyangwe is highly active in the Black Lives Matter movement and is the driving force behind WTP’s Mapping Police Violence project. ⁶¹ He previously worked at left-of-center PolicyLink. ⁶² Elzie is active in the left-wing Black Lives Matter movement. She previously worked as a field organizer for Amnesty International. ⁶³

Associated Organizations

Campaign Zero, a policing policy activist movement associated with the broader Black Lives Matter movement, is a project of We the Protesters. ⁶⁴ It went viral on social media in the wake of the police custody death of George Floyd for its “#8CantWait“ policy solutions infographic which demanded 8 left-wing policing changes. ⁶⁵

In its tax filings, WTP identifies left-wing digital accelerator and Black Lives Matter movement-affiliated Staywoke as a related organization. ⁶⁶

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