Investigating misuse of crowd control weapons against protestors

The last year has seen a notable increase in immigration enforcement actions across the United States. Ensuing public protests about federal immigration policy have often been met by aggressive responses from federal and local level law enforcement agencies. This has resulted in the widespread use of less-lethal weapons against civilians. 

The diffuse and fragmentary nature of the law enforcement response has confounded attempts to understand patterns of violence, much less hold agencies accountable to federal and local use of force standards. However, photos and videos of protest violence shared across social media allow for systematic documentation of these incidents through open source investigative methods. 

Our students and staff were tasked by our partners at Physicians for Human Rights to create an evidence-based record of abuse, misconduct, unsafe practices, and violations of crowd-control norms during immigration-related protests and demonstrations. They identified, verified, coded, and mapped more than 100 incidents across Minneapolis and Chicago, employing geolocation, chronolocation, and multi-source verification across social media and local reporting to do so. We documented these findings in a digital incident library, which will directly support a Physicians for Human Rights report on attacks against journalists and a larger analytical report on violence against protesters in summer 2026.