On March 13th, 2020, Breonna Taylor was killed by Louisville, Ky. police in a botched no-knock raid. Fury over her death, along with George Floyd’s brutal killing some two months later, became one of the main drivers of wide-scale demonstrations which erupted that summer over policing and racial injustice in the U.S. As of this writing, no officer has been charged with her shooting.
In the years since, 404 | Say Their Names took shape as a digital poetic response to the ongoing lack of accountability. When we encounter a 404 message, the server we are requesting content from is offering up a default explanation for what may have gone wrong. Normally, the page you’re trying to view doesn’t exist, has been moved, or is renamed. Point being that it’s not there and by asking servers for this content it forces them to write the requested URLs – with the names of the individual killed – onto their own server error logs, ultimately making the entities in question say their names.
It’s been a way to digitally inscribe the names of slain Black Women and Men onto the server logs of those policing organizations involved. A way to force them to say the name of those who died, to keep these cases, these lives, and the families, from not being forgotten.
Statistics from the Manhattan Institute + WaPo Police Shooting Database are sobering:
- “On-duty police fatally shoot about 1,000 people every year. This number and its racial breakdown have remained remarkably steady since 2015. The overall Post tally has ranged from a low of 958 in 2016, to a “record” of 1,055 in 2021, with any pattern difficult to distinguish from random chance.”
- “Approximately a quarter of those killed are black. This is roughly double the black share of the overall population, but it is in line with—and sometimes below—many other “bench-marks” that one might use for comparison, such as the racial breakdowns of arrests, murders, and violent-crime offenders as reported by victims in surveys.”
- “Blacks are an even higher percentage of unarmed civilians shot and killed by police (34%), which is a potential sign of bias. However, not all shootings of unarmed civilians are unjustified, and it is difficult to objectively classify these cases in a more granular fashion. And contrary to the popular perceptions outlined above, confirmed fatal police shootings of unarmed African-Americans number about 22 per year.”
- “More rigorous research into the question of whether police killings reflect racial bias is in its infancy, and it has been subject to intense debates over the appropriate methods. But existing studies are divided on the bias question. Many papers fail to find bias in lethal force, though one of the most careful studies in the literature—of an unnamed city with a high murder rate—does find that white cops discharge their guns several times as often as black cops when sent to 911 calls in heavily black neighborhoods.”
- Support the BREATHE Act
- End no-knock warrants
- Support positive community-police relationships, including instituting community oversight
- Create federal legislation to support the Citizens Police Data Project
- End qualified immunity
- Push to end the use of biased Risk Assessment Instruments (RAI) in sentencing
- Limit use of force by Police Officers
- Demilitarize the Police
- #SayTheirName
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to write to the error logs of those entities in power
to push for accountability
to push for transparency
to push for change
to push for justice
to force those in power to say their names
click the linked button below
repeat.
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As an ongoing work, new names are added regularly. If you would like to advocate for the inclusion of a name, raise questions, or concerns, please do so here.
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