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For the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, Forensic Architecture (FA) and the Invisible Institute (II) present a video investigation into the killing of Harith Augustus.
Click here to see the full investigation
On 14 July 2018, 37-year-old Harith Augustus was shot to death by police in Chicago’s South Shore neighbourhood. The killing took place in the context of an ‘investigatory stop’, which began with Augustus fully cooperating, and ended with him shot five times, his firearms licence in his hand, and his gun still clipped in its holster.
A year-long investigation by FA and II, involving on-the-ground reporting, FOIA requests, video analysis, and three-dimensional modelling, found serious violations of CPD’s ‘Force Options Directive’, as well as evidence that CPD subsequently manipulated announcements and evidence, including withholding critical video evidence for more than a year—in direct violation of CPD’s own protocols, introduced following the 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald, for which a CPD officer was convicted in 2018.
In consultation with the curators, Forensic Architecture and the Invisible Institute decided to remove the visual analyses from the Chicago Architecture Biennial exhibition space and make it available online and at the Invisible Institute, as well as other community spaces in Chicago. In doing so, we intend to create space in the gallery for critically important discussions about police violence and the politics of representation.
In South Shore, members of the public can view the video installation at the following address:
Experimental Station (enter through the coffee shop)
Monk Parakeet,
6100 S Blackstone Ave, Chicago
Thursdays/Fridays 12-5pm
Saturdays 10am-3pm
‘Looking and Showing’
This is a statement explaining the decision of FA and II not to show the videos in the exhibition.
In 1984, a section of 71st Street, which includes the site of the 2018 police shooting of Harith Augustus, was named Emmett Till Road in memorial tribute to the 14-year-old Chicago boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955. When Till’s body was returned to Chicago, his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on a public funeral with an open casket, exposing not only her child’s mutilated body but also the underlying conditions that allowed such an atrocity to be committed with impunity.
On the day Chicago police shot and killed Harith Augustus on Emmett Till Road, the city was preoccupied with the upcoming trial of a police officer for the 2014 killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Over a period of thirteen months, activists, lawyers, and journalists waged a campaign demanding to see police dash-camera video of the shooting. When it was eventually released, the video proved the functional equivalent of Emmett Till’s open casket: not only evidence of a crime, but a portal into the underlying conditions that enable and shield from public view police violence against black citizens.
This is the context in which we undertook our investigation of the police killing of Harith Augustus. As we became immersed in this year-long collaboration, certain questions surfaced. We are clear that our role is to conduct a counter-investigation to contest the official narrative; and we are equally clear about our responsibility to make the results of our investigation universally available and to share the techniques we used to arrive at our conclusions. However, over the course of the project, we were confronted by an apparent contradiction between the necessity of looking and the difficulty of showing. We became increasingly concerned about presenting graphic scenes of police violence against a black man in the context of an exhibition, about the danger of foreclosing other ways of engaging with the life of Harith Augustus by repeatedly showing his last moments, and about inflicting difficult images on visitors who had not consented to view them.
We have undertaken this project with the support and cooperation of Harith Augustus’s family and their legal representatives. Upon completing the project, we sent them the files. They asked us to make them widely available. We put the videos online on www.forensic-architecture.org and will present screenings at the Cultural Center, the Invisible Institute, and other community spaces on the South Side. The schedule is available on the Chicago Architecture Biennial website. The fact that the visual investigation is not presented in this gallery is an attempt to open a space for critically important discussions about police violence and the politics of representation.
Audio: “Show us what you see” / “I could not watch”
The morning after the killing, community activist Will Calloway held a press conference outside CPD headquarters and demanded that the police release all video footage of the shooting. “We must see the evidence,” he said. Speaking about the same videos after they were released, Audrey Petty, a poet and critic who lives in South Shore, explained that she “will not watch a video of another black man being murdered by the police” because it could divert attention from “other ways of engaging with the life of Harith”.
Images courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial / Daris Jasper, 2019
Images from the Experimental Station taken by Jason Schumer, 2019