Violencia Policial database (Argentina)

Violencia Policial (Police Violence) is a website that presents key cases of institutional violence in Argentina.

Violencia Policial (Police Violence) is a website that presents key cases of institutional violence in Argentina. It was created by CELS – Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (Center for Legal and Social Studies) with support from The Engine Room and technical support from HURIDOCS.

The website features:

  • statistics related to deaths in which security forces played a role
  • personal stories of the victims
  • detailed information about different categories of violence: killings of women, police executions, violence in custody, violence inflicted using “less lethal” weapons, and violence inflicted by off-duty police

The website is available in Spanish.

Lessons learned in undertaking a human rights database project

Before the launch of the Violencia Policial website, CELS had long been documenting institutional violence. But it soon became clear that they needed a platform that would make it easier to work with their existing trove of 12,000 cases.

With help from The Engine Room, CELS decided to move their existing collection into HURIDOCS’s flagship tool Uwazi. Migrating a database is no simple process. Read more about the lessons learned in this collaboration: “Using Uwazi to build a database documenting institutional violence