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In the United States, there is no official accounting of the people killed by police. To address that void in information, non-governmental and news organizations have been collecting data on such incidents.
Intercept data artist Josh Begley’s new project, “Officer Involved,” uses databases on police brutality compiled by The Guardian to present the problem in a new way. Begley’s project (like several others he has done) is an intervention that makes visible the violence behind the way we live. “Officer Involved” reveals the lack of innocence in the landscape, and, without sensationalism or sentimentality, challenges us to think about a deep injustice that so many of us accept as normal.
In row after row, we see photographs of corners, streets, suburbs, towns, all in daylight, almost all free of human presence. All these images — in spite of the mysterious lyric beauty of some of them — were captured indiscriminately by the all-seeing eye of Google, either with a bird’s-eye view or at street level. They were then selected and set into an array by Begley. In one sense, they are the same as any other stills randomly pulled from Google Maps. But when we look at these photographs in particular, we are also seeing the last thing that some other human being saw. It is an immersion in the environment of someone’s last moments.
If it is true, as our ancestors always suspected, that the dead continue to exert some influence on the places where they lived and died, then Begley’s photographic project makes that insight manifest.
How quiet these scenes are, how charged by a crisp light and brilliant clarity. They look like insignificant places, but all of them are full of significance for those whose loved ones died there. All are sites of premature death, all are sites where someone was killed, and most also index an unrestituted crime.
The American landscape is thickening with these incidents. If extra-judicial killing was always facile, the reporting of it is becoming so as well. This is the value of Begley’s project: to shift us into a sober space, a space of contemplation. It is important to have the numbers, but it is vital to have an affective intervention like this one as well, which shows us how difficult the current dispensation is to bear, and how it marks us, the streets on which we move, the places in which we live.
—Teju Cole, author of “Open City” and photography critic of the New York Times Magazine
Watch Police brutality 101 and please get it to a cop.https://youtu.be/KPwQahgxSDI
Not counted: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2015/06/excited_delirium_deaths_in_police_custody_diagnosis_or_cover_up.html : “What do we make of a syndrome that seems to occur almost unerringly when a police officer is choking, hog-tying, or stunning with a Taser someone with a mental illness or drug addiction?”
For all the data collection and data storage possessed by the Armed Forces of the Homeland, they can’t count their kills?
Activist art at its best! Kudos to The Intercept!!!
Great. Suggestions for improvement. 1) have an additional view that shows icons on a map 2) when you click on an image, include a link to backup material.
Powerful.
It’s a splendid collage, and a new approach to the problem. My compliments to Mr. Begley.
The Guardian is pursuing the numbers aspect, and worth noting this in parallel.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database
These photos should be geotagged in Google Earth, if they aren’t already. They are documents containing locational data that may yield no small amount of real information if they’re analyzed in context. The Guardian has done a great job of listing the dead in a temporal sequence, but they too, should get the data collated in a geodatabase. This information belongs in Google Earth Pro, or in an ArcMap project (both actually).
If you want to have a lasting impact, and change current practices, a GIS database that can be queried by attribute is a powerful tool. Politicians whose eyes glaze over when they view politically motivated art installations will address killing clusters mapped in their districts………. when the map images appear above the fold in their main urban newspaper.
Also, why has this guy: http://gawker.com/what-ive-learned-from-two-years-collecting-data-on-poli-1625472836, disappeared down the national media’s convenient memory hole? The byline on this Gawker piece is 10 months prior to the Guardian’s (derivative) work, and his work was also cited by Digby some months ago.
This project illustrates the pluses and minuses of a gods’-eye view. We see these intersections as Google does – brightly lit – because Apollo can have no notion of how the world looks by night. But sometimes the police are confronting their fears in the dark, and that too we do not see. Exu shows up at very many intersections indeed… but why? The database is said to exclude fatalities caused by the suspect crashing… so who summoned him? One could also run such science with the data, correlating with those infamous census maps by race (though I wish they were never created in the first place). The claim that they look like any other stills pulled from Google – that’s a testable hypothesis. I’m not sure I believe it though. There are things communities do in the name of social engineering and militarized law enforcement, and I think their imprint remains on these photographs, even if I cannot yet perceive it.
E pluribus unum. Many places, one result.
ex multis locis unum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAM3rIBG5k
We’re all living in America,
America ist wunderbar.
We’re all living in America,
Amerika, Amerika.
Wenn getanzt wird, will ich führen,
auch wenn ihr euch alleine dreht,
lasst euch ein wenig kontrollieren,
Ich zeige euch wie’s richtig geht.
Wir bilden einen lieben Reigen,
die Freiheit spielt auf allen Geigen,
Musik kommt aus dem Weien Haus,
Und vor Paris steht Mickey Maus.
Chorus:
We’re all living in America,
America ist wunderbar.
We’re all living in America,
Amerika, Amerika.
Ich kenne Schritte, die sehr ntzen,
und werde euch vor Fehltritt schtzen,
und wer nicht tanzen will am Schluss,
weiss noch nicht das er Tanzen muss!
Wir bilden einen lieben Reigen,
ich werde Euch die Richtung zeigen,
nach Afrika kommt Santa Claus,
und vor Paris steht Mickey Maus.
Chorus:
We’re all living in America,
America ist wunderbar.
We’re all living in America,
Amerika, Amerika.
We’re all living in America,
Coca-Cola, Wonderbra,
We’re all living in America,
Amerika, Amerika.
This is not a love song,
this is not a love song.
I don’t sing my mother’s tongue,
No, this is not a love song.
Chorus:
We’re all living in America,
Amerika ist wunderbar.
We’re all living in America,
Amerika, Amerika.
We’re all living in America,
Coca-Cola, sometimes WAR,
We’re all living in America,
Amerika, Amerika.
Great! Perfect compliment to “The counted” where the Guardian is doing good work. These efforts really help to bring numbers and bland police reports into focus and points out forcefully the humanity of the victims.
To be in their shoes at that moment.
Nice story, but who are you? Are you an Interceptor or an Advertiser? Please add Chop-Chop Square in Riyadh. It does not have Google street view, so you will need to go there for the shoot, I mean the chop – shooting is banned there.
The criterion here is US locations. Any form of art would have its premise; you wouldn’t expect the Mona Lisa to include a kangaroo in the background, would you? Besides, it isn’t the Saudi police that the US public is having problems with.
For those who didn’t already know who Mr. Cole is, this is at bottom of piece:
The man writes like an angel.