EVIDENCE OF BLUE.

Witness: Perspectives on Police Violence by Bradley McCallum in collaboration with Jacqueline Tarry 

The deeply entrenched racism and violence of American culture make a cop's job dangerous and a civilian's life precarious, particularly if the civilian happens to be a young non-white male. As evidence one need look no further than the front-page trial of four New York Police Department (NYPD) officers who fired 41 shots at an unarmed, innocent man named Amadou Diallo. New York's grand Cathedral of St. John the Divine (known as St. John's) with its mission to serve as a sanctuary, a community center and a pulpit for healing, is a fitting venue for an art installation about a social problem as serious and tragic as police violence.

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine New York, New York November 4-December 20, 1999

Brad McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry's installation "Witness: Perspectives on Police Violence" (1999) was produced from hundreds of hours of interviews with parents and relatives of the deceased victims, survivors, concerned lawyers and community activists and drew on the expertise of several organizations including the Center for Constitutional Rights, Parents Against Police Brutality, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care and The National Action Network. Divided into several sections and spread throughout the vast, majestic space of St. John's, "Witness" provided a unique and moving forum for the issue of police violence.

Along the cathedral's long dark side aisles, one encountered six distinct spaces. In this largest and most compelling section of "Witness," the artists skillfully met the challenge of creating quiet, intimate spaces within the cavernous cathedral in which to convey sad and disturbing information. The viewer was required to enter--like entering a confessional--these narrow, vaulted spaces, each about three-feet wide by 10-feet long and 20-feet high in order to hear the testimonies and read the brief texts of excerpts from the testimonies and highlights of the cases on the waist-high light boxes. An individual face was projected high up on the far stone wall of each space. At first glance the images seemed to be still photographs. The calm faces appeared motionless until you noticed that the eyes occasionally blinked and realized that each face belonged to a voice on the tapes--a successful alternative to the talking head that so often turns the viewer into a passive voyeur.

The articulate voices related personal accounts of police brutality inflicted on their friends, family and community members. All of the victims were non-white males and almost all were under the age of 30, with one just 13 years old. They included transit officer Desmond Robinson, who, while pursuing a possible felon, was shot five times in the back by an off-duty NYPD officer who mistook him for the suspect; Nicholas Heyward Jr., age 13, and Yong Xin Huang, age 16, shot and killed in separate incidents for holding weapons that turned out to be a toy gun and a BB gun, respectively (one of the light boxes displayed Heyward Jr.'s toy gun); Annibal Carras-quillo, shot and killed for allegedly assuming an "apparent combat stance;" Anthony Rosario Jr. and Hilton Vega, both shot and killed while lying face down; Anthony Baez, at the time playing football in front of his home, killed by Officer Francis Livoti's choke hold. All of the cases went through the Civilian Complaint Review Board and two were settled, but most are still pending or action has yet to be taken by the NYPD. As several of the victims' parents are working with organizations like the ones previously mentioned to end police brutality, it would have been beneficial to learn more about their activist efforts and how the survivors of police brutality are fighting back. [1]

A large back-lit photograph positioned close to the floor illuminated the entrance to each of these spaces. Looking like film noir stills, these photographs were nighttime shots of the actual sites where the fateful encounters between police and civilians occurred. Unfortunately, these grainy, somber images of strangely deserted streets lacked the specificity that these sites deserved. For example, on the side of Baez's home in the Bronx that faces a nearby El train is a large painted mural dedicated to him; yet in the installation photograph, this mural was nearly invisible.

Further back, toward the cathedral's choir section, four cast-iron emergency call boxes were arranged in front of a 30-foot-long wall of newspaper clippings about police violence. The call boxes were dedicated to four victims of police violence and contained small illuminated photographs and tape recordings related to the tragedies. The artists have applied for permits to place these call boxes at the actual sites involved.

Even further back was the last and smallest section of "Witness," "Police Line," a display of graphite rubbings taken from the Police Memorial Wall in downtown Battery Park City of the names of 17 police officers killed in the line of duty from 1993 to 1998. This silent tribute--or perhaps quiet concession to the other side of the urban wars--raised questions about the silence of the NYPD in this installation. In one of the small spaces of the first "testimony" section we heard voices of transit cops, one of whom pointed out the wide gulf of antagonism between the transit officers and the patrol officers. But from the patrol officers, we heard no words from deceased officers' families and no confessions or defense. It is unlikely that members of the NYPD would have consented to be interviewed for this show. The "blue wall of silence" is of course part of the problem of police violence, and one not easily solved. For example, Officer Daisy Boria, who courageously broke out of the closed ranks to testify again st Livoti in the first trial of the Baez case, was subsequently harassed and hounded out of the NYPD while Livoti was acquitted. (He was later found guilty in federal court and is serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence.)

Other artists have made work concerning police violence and its tragic consequences. Last summer the activist art collective REPOhistory installed street signs in New York City designed by Jenny Polak and David Thorne about police brutality and the artist Dread Scott has consistently challenged the NYPD's treatment of minorities. The need for artists to engage the public sphere about overlooked, even unpopular subjects like police brutality is all the more pressing at a time when the use of public space as a forum for dialogue is under attack by both City Hall and commercial developers. "Witness" made a significant contribution to focusing public attention on this difficult social issue and one hopes that the artists succeed in their plans to travel the work to other venues including the streets themselves.

JANET KOENIG is a New York City artist and a member of the activist public art collective REPOhistory.

NOTES

(1.) For a record of victims killed by police nationally since 1990 see Stolen Lives: killed by Law Enforcement, produced from the Stolen Lives Project by the Anthony Baez Foundation, the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality and the National Lawyers Guild, Second Ed., New York, 1999.