A People’s Archive of State Violence collects, preserves, and shares the stories, memories, and accounts of police violence as experienced or observed by the People. The archive hopes to provide the People, wherever and whoever they may be, a safe and secure space to share any testimony, documents, or accounts that narrate or reflect on encounters or effects of police violence in their lives and communities.
State violence extends beyond police violence, though police are certainly agents of the state. The poisoned waters in Flint, Newark, and Pittsburgh are violent. The jailing of indigenous activists, water protectors, and environmental activists is violent. The deportation, separation of families, and caging of immigrants by ICE is violent. The death penalty is certainly violent, as is the criminal punishment system, mass incarceration, and the poverty and suffering caused by it.
Since 1980, over 17,000 police killings have gone unreported. What can this statistic tell you about the grief and trauma of the families of each of those victims? In 2020, ~13% of the US population identified as Black; 26% of the victims of police killings are Black. Despite making up close to 5% of the global population, the U.S. has more than 20% of the world’s prison population, disproportionately made up of Black and Latino individuals. For every $1 that a White man earns, an African American woman earns $0.61 and a Latina earns $0.54. ICE books an average of 8,400 people a month. This list could go on forever.
Do these statistics tell the stories of mothers, fathers, siblings, sons, daughters, and friends who will never see their loved ones again? Of being incarcerated in an unjust system? Of being deported and separated from one’s family? The suffering of a human being cannot possibly be contained in a single data point. This dehumanization serves a purpose, to distance the viewers/readers from the very real impact of systemic racism. This archive seeks to combat this by sharing intimately the personal experiences of the People.
All stories are added to the archive as they are received; we do not change or edit submissions other than to scrub the identifying data from files.