San Francisco Killings by Law Enforcement, 1990 - present
The timeline is a tool that remembers, counts, mourns and honors our dead. It is a collaborative effort of documentation over time that makes visible the many resistances that have refused erasure. This refusal itself is a confrontation against state violence. The timeline reflects our insurgent and organized community in San Francisco and across the Bay Area and in its detail is reflected the work and tears and blood of many over time. Each vertical line represents a year in the history and present of our city and those whose lives were lost in that year, and counted. Based on what we know, we know that there are more lives that have been taken that are still missing here. We invite any names that we have missed and humbly invite corrections to any possible errors.
Running below the timeline are a series of conjunctures marked by the beginning and end of the reign of specific police chiefs of the San Francisco Police Department, including the most recent ousting of Chief Greg Suhr on May 19th, 2016. Also present along the lower lines and within these conjunctures are prominent department scandals and events, which include moments when specific strategies and practices of policing were introduced or officially sanctioned by the department.
The timeline relies on local knowledges and the circuits of struggle where details and critical information are exchanged and circulated among us. It reflects our ongoing commitment to each other to continue to gather in streets, parks, community centers, taquerias, bars and cafes to share what we know and elaborate the strategies and practices of policing, violence, and control that are aimed at us, department by department, program by program, across the state. In this way, we hope to collectively map for ourselves across communities the war that is organized against us as low intensity conflict in service of capital's racial regime. As a project of militant and convivial research this is a collaboration across our many rebellions, insurgencies, and networked moments of care to confront militarization and organize around our own community safety.
Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy
