Samuel Sinyangwe is an American policy analyst and racial justiceactivist. Sinyangwe is a member of the Movement for Black Lives and a co-founder of We the Protestors, a group of digital tools that include Mapping Police Violence, a database of police killings in the United States, and Campaign Zero, a policy platform to end police violence. Sinyangwe is a co-host of the Pod Save the People podcast, where he discusses the week's news with a panel of other activists.
Early life
Sinyangwe was born May 12, 1990 to a Tanzanian father and a Jewish mother who met while studying at Cornell University. He grew up in the College Park neighborhood of Orlando, Florida and attended Winter Park High School in the International Baccalaureate program. He has discussed the influence of his upbringing in Florida, where he was a black child often surrounded by white peers, on his eventual career trajectory; he was shaken and moved to action after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, where Sinyangwe had regularly attended soccer practice: "I was that kid. I could have been Trayvon. That’s why it hit me so personally and that’s why I realized that needed to be something that took the priority in terms of my focus." Sinyangwe graduated from Stanford University, where he studied how race intersects with American politics, economics, and class.
Career
Sinyangwe started his career at PolicyLink with the Promise Neighborhoods Institute. As protests emerged in the wake of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, he connected with Ferguson activists online, ultimately taking a leave of absence from his job to join them in Missouri. With DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie, he began working to develop policy solutions to address police violence in America. Sinyangwe particularly noticed the absence of official government statistics on police violence and began compiling them from other sources like Fatal Encounters and KilledbythePolice.net, in order to challenge claims about police shootings being rare events or only resulting from resisting arrest. With other activists, Sinyangwe founded We the Protestors, an organization aimed at developing a set of digital tools to support Black Lives Matter activism. We the Protestors projects include a database of police killings, Mapping Police Violence, and a platform of policy solutions to end police violence called Campaign Zero. Sinyangwe also serves as a data scientist for OurStates.org, a project focused on state legislatures and with Mckesson and Brittney Packnett founded the Resistance Manual, an open-source project aimed at connecting anti-racist activists with activists focused on intersecting issues. During the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, Sinyangwe and colleagues met with Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton on these policy issues. He has been a vocal critic of the "Ferguson Effect", using data to refute the theory that policing had diminished and crime increased in face of activist scrutiny of police use of force. Melissa Harris-Perry has compared Sinyangwe to journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, noting that Wells began her work by "compil the data, the social science and research about how, when and where lynchings were happening to begin to make it stop." Sinyangwe is a co-host of Mckesson's podcast Pod Save the People, which discusses the week's news with a panel of other activists including Mckesson, Packnett and Clint Smith. The podcast particularly focuses on race, grassroots activism, discrimination and other forms of inequality; recommending Pod Save The People in GQ, June Diane Raphael of How Did This Get Made? wrote, "The stories they uplift and think critically about are the ones I'm now wondering why I've never been exposed to/exposed myself to." Sinyangwe has also been featured on CNN, MSNBC, BBC News, FiveThirtyEight, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications. He has written for the Huffington Post and The Guardian.
Awards and fellowships
In 2017, Sinyangwe was named to the Forbes30 Under 30 list for law and policy. He was also a 2017 Echoing Green Black Male Achievement Fellow.
