My name is Brianna Wells, and I’m a graduating senior at Michigan. I came to Documenting Criminalization and Confinement (DCC) team through my involvement in the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, which addresses the history of police violence in Detroit during the 20th century. Prior to joining DCC, I’d worked on a couple of historical research projects involving archival research, including a Women and Gender Studies research fellowship, as well as curating an exhibit on histories of Black activism for reproductive justice. I was drawn to the HistoryLab because of the project’s public-facing platform, which is a concept that I hadn’t encountered very often in academic spaces. My involvement with the project has taught me a lot about what it means to engage with history in a way that’s responsible to a living, breathing community.
Through the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, students investigate cases of police violence and trends in policing throughout 20th century Detroit. My team’s work focuses on police misconduct during the 1970s, during the advent of the War of Drugs. Our findings are presented through an online exhibit and interactive maps. A crucial feature of our work is that it’s accessible to a multitude of public audiences. The website serves as a captivating platform for advancing findings on Detroit’s history of police brutality and contributing to collective knowledge of policing in the United States. Our findings will be available to other historians, those affected by the criminal legal system, victims of police brutality, community organizations, and the local government of Detroit. Additionally, our research can inform high school curricula, policy, and criminal justice activism. The platforms we use to publicize this history—StoryMaps and Omeka—contribute to the project’s public accessibility and visual appeal.
Interdisciplinary collaboration across teams is important to reaching our target audiences, as well. Members of the DCC team come from a variety of academic backgrounds, and each collaborator’s expertise draws attention from a different audience. Also, working in a collaborative setting fosters creativity by allowing us to share ideas with one another. The collaborative element of this project is reflected in the dynamic and compelling character of the product we present to our audiences.
The research methods involved in this project have challenged many of my prior assumptions about what it means to be an historian. With historical research, it is not always easy to see the implications of your work outside of an academic setting. Through this project, however, I have begun to see how investigating the past, and making those discoveries known to a public audience, is an incredibly political pursuit with wide-ranging implications for the broader community. This project constantly forces us as researchers to engage with questions of ethics in our research processes, especially as we investigate the histories of a community that many of us do not belong to. We must also consider our role in unearthing the experiences of individuals who are possibly still alive, or whose loved ones are still alive. The time period we’re investigating wasn’t that long ago, and its effects on the Detroit community reverberate into the present. The sensitive nature of the themes we’re researching means that we inevitably dredge up trauma experienced by not only individuals, but families and the community. A large part of the history we’re documenting includes the stories of youth, so there are ethical concerns implicated there, as well.
In our research so far, we have discovered an array of archival evidence that makes a strong argument for the pervasiveness of police violence and negligence in Detroit. It has been more difficult, however, for us to process the combination of police incidences and historical context to make clear arguments about other areas of police misconduct. The discontinuity between what is present in the archives and what we know about police behavior throughout our time period speaks to the politics of the archive. As I reflect on the two semesters of work I’ve done on the project, one of the most important lessons learned has been that archives are not necessarily neutral or objective repositories of history. Silences in the archival record often say more than what is materially present.
