A new app sends you the name of each person killed by the police

“Jesus,” I thought, looking down at my phone. And that’s the idea.

All that was on my phone was a push notification which said, “Jim Redmond.”
As I’m writing this I just got another one. “Timothy Albert.”
I don’t know who these people are, but I know they’re dead. That’s because the notifications are coming from a new app called Archives + Absences. It’s an application which sends the name of each person killed by police as those deaths are reported.
Brooklynite Josh Begley created the app and announced it via Twitter Wednesday. Begley is an artist who works with data. He’s most known for his Twitter account Dronestream, which tweets a link to every reported covert U.S. drone strike around the world. Most are in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. He also works as a research editor at The Intercept. He did not return a request for comment for this story.

I made a new iPhone app. It sends you an alert every time the police kill someone in the U.S. https://t.co/M3IOCDgRPn

— Josh Begley (@joshbegley) January 20, 2016

Jim Bravis Redmond Jr. allegedly robbed a Harvey’s Supermarket in Hahira, Ga., a very small town 215 miles down Interstate 75 south from Atlanta, nearly at the border with Florida, on Jan. 19. According to local news station WCTV, Redmond slipped the cashier at Harvey’s a note demanding the money in the register, opening his jacket to show he was armed. She complied and after he left, called the police. Police located Redmond’s car several miles down I-75 at a Pilot gas station, where he was surrounded.
“According to preliminary witness reports, the male failed to drop the weapon or surrender before pointing the gun at law enforcement who then fired upon him,” said Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Jamy Steinberg, reported ValdostaToday.com.
Redmond was wanted by the U.S. military on desertion charges. He’d been stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C.

Redmond had been the passenger in a car driven by his girlfriend, Crystal Griffin Redd, a 32-year-old wanted mother of two, who had last been seen two months ago on security footage taking thousands of dollars from the safe of the Food Lion store she worked at in Virginia on Nov. 20.
On Dec. 30, 40 days after she’d been missing, her family took to the local news in Virginia to ask her to come out of hiding.
“Come home, we love you no matter what you’ve done,” her mother said to WTVR.
A now-deleted Facebook page accessed via cache called Missing Jim Bravis Redmond,jr had pictures and messages about Redmond. It seems to have been written by a woman who identifies him as her ex-boyfriend and her child’s father.
“Jim disappeared in November with a woman, Crystal Griffin,” a Dec. 27 post said. “I am disturbed by his suggested involvement, i have known Jim since seventh grade It’s not like him to not contact us. I am trying to locate him and I would like help in finding him. He is my child’s father, and I am a single mother with limited resources. He was last known to have been seen with Crystal Griffin.”
Another post, at 5:37 a.m. that morning read, “he likes to wear hats and wear his hair in a military fashion. He grows a red beard and has patches around the cheek that make it look sparse and not full. He is guaranteed to be wearing a tshirt, jeans and brown western boots.”

A website called USFallenwarriors.com has a death entry under “Peacetime Casualties” for another Jim Bravis Redmond. This one, a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army, was born in 1967 in Louisiana and died Nov. 9, 1996 at the age of 29. His occupation is listed as “Intelligence Analyst.” Incident Type is reported as “Non-hostile death.” Casualty Category: “Self-inflicted.”
The seven officers involved in the shooting of Jim Bravis Redmond Jr., 28, have been placed on administrative leave, as the Sheriff’s department investigates.