Archivist Jarrett Drake’s Article on Building an Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland

https://medium.com/on-archivy/archivesforblacklives-building-a-community-archives-of-police-violence-in-cleveland-93615d777289

Jarrett Drake’s article in Medium outlines the development of a People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland as he argues for more archiving of the Black experience, free from institutional restrictions, i.e., independent community archives. Drake was instrumental in contacting Puncture the Silence and rallying dozens of professional archivists to collaborate in a StoryCorps-type project in Cleveland, OH, during the summer of 2015. The archivists were in Cleveland for a national conference, looking for a “service project”. The national attention to the police murders of Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell in 2012 and Tanisha Anderson and Tamir Rice in 2014, lead them to Puncture the Silence-Stop Mass Incarceration, an organization very active in the struggle for justice around police murders. After the street interviews with those who had experienced, or had something to say about, police violence, and with an awareness of the People’s Tribunal on Police Brutality in Cleveland, the archivists suggested an archive be created. The Archive was launched in 2017, and is now the heart of a new website of Right the Record, Exposing Police Violence in Cleveland, righttherecord.org.