Impact: Index’s vertical approach

Our method, inherited from Forensic Architecture and forged through experience, rests on one principle: a single case, meticulously reconstructed in all its complexity, makes tangible a structural problem that statistics or a bird’s-eye view leave abstract.

When people in exile drown trying to cross the Channel, their deaths regularly make brief items in the press, and public attention rarely dwells on them. When Index reconstructed in 3D the night Jumaa al-Hasan, a 27-year-old Syrian in exile, died – gathering the testimonies of those who were there, showing exactly what the police officers deployed that night were responsible for – the structural problem of violence at the borders became concrete, visible, and unacceptable. AFP picked up the investigation, a complaint was filed, prosecutors opened a judicial investigation and referred it to the IGPN, the police’s internal affairs body.

Every Index investigation works this way: because the individual case restores the texture of reality, it becomes a prism through which a broader pattern can be seen, understood, and grasped far more clearly than from a statistical or top-down angle. The death of Nahel Merzouk is the prism of the issue of “refusing to stop for the police” (refus d’obtempérer) and of the lethal use of weapons by the police. The “Napalm Girl” photograph is the prism of the Western media system’s confiscation of Vietnam’s history from the Vietnamese. The deaths in Saint-Louis, Kanaky-New Caledonia, are the prism of how routinely exceptional measures are used in the French overseas territories.

With a small team and a modest budget, Index cannot cast a wide net. Nor is that our ambition. We concentrate our resources on a critical point: the exact place where our expertise in digital investigation can tip the understanding of the facts.

This concentration is not a constraint we endure but a strategy. If we manage to change the course of a case – its public understanding, its judicial outcome – then that result becomes a concrete glimmer of hope for every comparable situation. When two officers of the Stains BAC, the plainclothes anti-crime unit, were convicted of firearms violence over a “refusal to stop” – as happened on 7 November 2024 at the Bobigny court – a dam burst. It shows that independent counter-expertise can stand up to the institutional mechanisms that tend to guarantee impunity for law enforcement. A single decision changes what is possible for every family engaged in similar struggles.

This is what makes our impact transformative: each concrete result – a conviction, a suspect placed under formal investigation (mise en examen), the collapse of an official account, the release of someone wrongly accused – acts as a catalyst for deep change, far beyond the individual case.

Index’s strategy is to give the methods of digital investigation a lasting home in France, and to put them to work within an existing network of mobilised actors – victims’ family committees, grassroots collectives, lawyers, media, NGOs – with whom we build long-term relationships.

These local roots do not preclude an international reach – they feed it. Each of our French cases resonates with similar situations around the world: police violence, abuses of state power, the erasure of victims. Born out of Forensic Architecture and a member of the Investigative Commons network, Index is part of a solidarity that transcends borders, and takes its methods into other contexts when the opportunity arises: in Kanaky-New Caledonia, in Italy, in occupied Palestine, in the United States… The investigation into the “Napalm Girl” photograph, at the heart of a documentary broadcast worldwide on Netflix, has greatly accelerated this international recognition.