SMALL PRESS

Chest Wound To The Chest is a text that was drawn from more extensive daily notes made while listening to the police scanner in Chicago for 75 days straight between September 10, 2020 and November 23, 2020.

The larger project PUBLIC COLLECTORS POLICE SCANNER was a meditation on policing in America (and Chicago specifically) with an eye toward an abolitionist future where we no longer depend on police forces to solve common social problems.  Listening to the dispatchers and police was an opportunity to better understand what people call the police for and the role of the dispatcher in initiating police responses to citizen and business requests and complaints.  All statements were written down, to the best of my ability, as they were spoken by dispatchers or police officers.  This text derived from many unrelated incidents and was not a continuous narrative.