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Public Culture 14.2 (2002) 305-309



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41 Shots

Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen


. . . a photo essay based on our fourteen-minute digital video essay of the same name, is an intense, formal contemplation of how police violence is produced and then addressed by other forces in the city streets. The streets, at night, are seen as occupied by vibrant, constantly shifting colors and images and by the frantic movement of anxiety and influence, insult and injury.

We completed 41 Shots several weeks before the trial of the four white officers of the New York Police Department (NYPD) Street Crimes Unit who killed the West African street vendor Amadou Diallo as he stood in the vestibule of his apartment building. 41 Shots seizes on the grotesquely bald, factual precision of the numerical data—19 out of 41 shots fired in 10 seconds by 4 police officers pulverize 1 defenseless body—to structure a visual argument. The integers from 1 to 41 register as the images of street addresses and vestibules within Manhattan that have not received the violent attentions of the almost entirely white Street Crimes Unit. Behind these forty-one locked vestibules live citizens who probably consider themselves safe from the depredations of unknown elements. 41 Shots intimates that they (we) are in fact at risk—not from the unknown, but from the appointed guardians of public safety. The vestibule, a transitional zone between inside and outside,




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operates as an architectural metaphor for the moment when the sanctioned forces of order become a great disorder, and we must confront the possibility of our vulnerability.

The nationwide ratcheting up of police activity has been intellectually grounded in, and validated by, the highly influential "broken windows" theory of criminology first articulated by sociologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in "Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety," Atlantic Monthly, March 1982. Arguing in that article that "if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken," the authors champion trampling on the rights of the individual in favor of the community. In practice, the broken windows theory notoriously posits zero tolerance of the most minor of offenses, urging official aggression toward those who appear to be different in the so-called community, such as vagrants (i.e., the homeless). The NYPD, while adopting the broken windows theory of policing under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, quickly dropped the authors' pretense of commitment to community integrity, expanding the attack on difference in favor of a scorched earth, implicitly racist approach to combating crime, with all authority vested in the hands of the police. Given what Wilson and Kelling call the "relentless maintenance of standards," the illusion of community also disappears in favor of

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the value of "civility" as defined by those in power. In 41 Shots we juxtapose the broken windows theory with its antidemocratic implications for street life in New York City and suggest that such sinister intellectual justifications for the arbitrary exercise of force lead directly to police murder—and, as it happened, to the eventual absolution of police violence by the justice system. We counter this suspect sociology with fleeting carnivalesque scenes of highly policed street demonstrations and Halloween parades, intimating both a vision of the urban landscape as a necropolis and developing resistance to the closure of public space.

Coda

That New York City might literally take on the character of a necropolis was unimaginable to us when we made 41 Shots. The destruction of the World Trade Center horrifyingly confirmed the vulnerability of urban dwellers to unprovoked attack.

 



Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen's most recent video is Some Notes on Ruins, an essay on archaeology, cinema, and mortality. Ernest Larsen's study of The Usual Suspects will be published in 2002. For information on their videos, write to elarsen3@aol.com. 41 Shots is also distributed by Video Data Bank; contact info@vdb.org.

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