#Research Handbook for Security Force Monitor
This handbook explains the data structure of the Security Force Monitor and the process of entering data into it. Currently, data entry is done into a spreadsheet pending the release of a CMS.
This is a first cut and should not be considered complete – please add comments on areas that could be improved upon, identify needed additions, suggest deletions or other edits.
The guide will explain each column in the spreadsheet from left to right as well as the various tabs as well.
While considerable technological and methodological advances have improved the documentation of human rights violations, a lack of clearly presented and precise information about police, militaries, and other security forces in countries of human rights concern continues to undermine these efforts.
There is a great deal of publicly available data on security forces, but it is unstructured and scattered amongst a wide variety of sources, making it prohibitively costly for those engaged in public interest work to understand the security forces of a particular country. The Security Force Monitor – a project of the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute – aims to solve this problem by structuring public data on security forces to empower and inform journalism, human rights reporting and other public interest work.
The Monitor will compile data from government sources, local and international news media, civil society reporting and other sources, assign a confidence level, and provide. This data will be published online using open source technologies and data visualization techniques. Researchers, journalists and other users will be able to explore the data in lots of different ways:
- Charts documenting the organizational and command hierarchies of police, military and security forces
- Maps of the location and jurisdiction of security forces
- Dossiers on commanders and units
- Maps and dossiers of documented human rights abuses committed by security forces as reported by civil society organizations, the United Nations and other sources