Founded by journalist Maria Berezina, the site monitors deaths in police stations, pre-trial detention facilities and related institutions, and publishes the information online.
Berezina, who previously worked at the Journalism Investigations Agency in St Petersburg, said she first noticed the reports of frequent deaths while working for the prominent Russian opposition journalist Oleg Kashin.
She decided to request data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and said she had been shocked by the statistics.
Each month, the official figures showed that between nine and 29 people died at police stations across the country, with very few cases ever investigated further.
Berezina informed Kashin of her discovery, who wrote a column about the figures.
“If every day the news brings sudden death at a police station, then we’re really talking about some strange epidemic that needs to have clearly identified reasons, needs to be localized and combatted effectively,” Kashin wrote.
“I’m afraid of this epidemic and I want everyone to be afraid, because it is terrifying, and it must be stopped,” he added.
Berezina decided to make the data more visible, and launched Russian Ebola in March last year. The name is a reference to the deadly virus which has killed thousands across west Africa.
“It’s not difficult to find these reports,” Berezina said in an interview with the Russian Spektr website. “I just search in Yandex.news, I type in a search query like ‘Police. Died’. This doesn’t take a lot of time.”
Besides daily updates and summary statistics each month, the site also publishes opinion columns by human rights lawyers and advocates discussing police abuse and detainee rights.
Though the site seeks to raise awareness, Berezina has said Russian Ebola won’t leak information about alleged police mistreatment but will rely solely on official and publicly available statistics.
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