On 14 July 2018, 37-year-old Harith Augustus was shot to death by police in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. 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.

The Chicago Police Department issued a statement later that day, in which it described the death as the result of an ‘armed confrontation’.

Protests and demonstrations erupted, and extended throughout the night and the following day; not only had Augustus been a popular figure in his neighbourhood, but the city was tensely awaiting the trial of a police officer for the 2014 killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Attempting to quell the outrage, the Chicago Police Department quickly released video footage of the incident. The city’s police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, claimed that the footage ‘speaks for itself’, and that Augustus’ death was the result of a justifiable ‘split-second decision’.

In collaboration with Chicago’s Invisible Institute, Forensic Architecture (FA) investigated the killing, unpacking the ‘split second’ of Augustus’ killing through six distinct temporal lenses, each of which exposes a different dimension of police violence. Taken together, these investigations raise fundamental questions about policing and race in the United States.

This investigation was produced for the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial. In consultation with the curators and our project partners at the Invisible Institute, we decided to remove the visual analyses from the exhibition and make it available online and at the Invisible Institute as well as other community spaces on the South Side (a schedule is on the Biennial website). In doing so, we intend to create space in the gallery for critically important discussions about police violence and the politics of representation.

Days

We reviewed announcements made by the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and other official bodies in the days following the incident. We demonstrated that construction of the official narrative started in the immediate aftermath of the incident and that the CPD distorted known facts and selectively released the videos in their possession, in an effort to deflect the public outrage provoked by the incident.

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Hours

With the help of Trina Reynolds-Tyler, an Invisible Institute researcher who was at the scene shortly after the incident, we reconstructed the protest that erupted in response to the killing and its violent repression by the police. Evoking the police cordon as a site of encounter between civil society and the state, she recounted how activists monitored the police and how officers breached the cordon to beat and arrest protesters.

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Minutes

A month after the incident, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, several videos capturing the incident were released. In studying this material, it became evident that all five police officers present violated regulations by failing to turn on their body cameras when engaging in an “investigative stop” of Harith Augustus. As a result, no sound of the incident was captured. Using visual evidence, police statements, and witness testimony, we have re-constructed an approximation of what was said and heard in order to produce a more complete account of the event.

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Seconds

We analyzed each video and modelled the movements of each character in the incident from all available perspectives. This allowed us to reveal otherwise unseen nuances in the movements of the various characters and the relations between them. We could clearly see how an officer attempted to grab Augustus from behind, using abrupt physical force without verbal warning, when Augustus was clearly cooperating with another officer. This disruption of a clearly civil interaction set in motion the sequence of actions that resulted in the killing of Augustus.

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Milliseconds

We dived inside the “split second” to examine the temporality of cognition, sensory transmission, and response time. We assessed the visual information accessible to the officer at the moment he decided to shoot. We compared his responses to those of the other four officers who had access to similar sensory inputs but, rather than shoot, chose to take cover or attempted to de-escalate. This analysis demonstrated how “perceptual distortions” and racial bias can result in a decision to shoot.

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Years

Through a series of interviews with residents of the South Side, we examined the conditions that shaped the place in which Harith Augustus was killed: the persistence of hyper-segregation, the history of black armed self-defense, and the relationship of policing to the flow of life in the South Shore community.

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