Najafi, Sina and Weizman, Eyal, eds. 2021. Forensic Architecture Reports #1: The Police Shooting of Mark Duggan. Brooklyn, NY / London: Cabinet Books / Institute of Contemporary Art London. ISBN 9781932698855 [Edited Book]

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Abstract or Description

This is the first installation of Forensic Architecture Reports, a series of books each dedicated to a single FA investigation, with insights into the agency’s research methodologies, additional texts from and interviews with collaborators, and dossiers of documents that shaped the investigation in question.

On the evening of 4 August 2011, Mark Duggan was shot and killed by the police in the north London neighbourhood of  Tottenham after the minicab in which he was traveling was pulled over by a team of undercover officers. The team had begun following Duggan shortly after receiving intelligence that he was in possession of a gun, and the officer who shot him testified that he had seen, for a ‘split second’, Duggan aiming the gun at him after he had exited the minicab. However, the gun was not found next to Duggan’s body on the pavement. According to the police, they discovered it in a patch of grass some seven meters away.

After a coroner’s inquest ruled Duggan’s killing ‘lawful’ and the police watchdog organisation issued a report siding with the officers’ version of events, the Duggan family’s legal team commissioned Forensic Architecture to conduct an investigation into the critical question at the heart of the case: How did the gun end up in the grass?  With no video footage of the shooting itself, Forensic Architecture had to rely primarily on the written and oral testimony of the officers involved to develop a spatial investigation designed to test the plausibility of the police’s narrative and to examine whether the officers themselves could have planted the gun.

In addition to detailing the methodologies employed and conclusions reached by Forensic Architecture, this volume offers a selection of the primary documents used for the investigation; an introduction by Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture, analysing the notions of ‘pre-emption’ and ‘split-second decision making’, which are often invoked to defend police killings of Black people; a roundtable with scholar Adam Elliott-Cooper, activists  Temi Mwale and Stafford Scott, and attorney Marcia  Willis Stewart on the complex colonial and legal histories that have shaped the policing of Black Britons in the postwar era; and the transcript of a speech by Scott on the struggle for justice for those who have died as a result of racialised policing.

Item Type:	Edited Book
Additional Information:	Editors: Sina Najafi Eyal Weizman Associate Editor: Jeffrey Kastner Assistant Editors: Elizabeth Breiner Robert Trafford Proofreaders: Julianna Bjorksten Xiran Lu Graphic Designer: Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey Investigation by Forensic Architecture Principal Investigator: Eyal Weizman Researcher-in-Charge: Christina Varvia Project Coordinators: Nicholas Masterton Robert Trafford Research: Martyna Marciniak Tom James Video Editing: Antoine Schirer Virtual Reality Design: Alican Aktürk Research Assistance: Lola Conte Sophie Dyer Project Support: Sarah Nankivell Voiceover: Kamara Scott Sound Design: Odinn Ingibergsson
Keywords:	Mark Duggan, police violence, forensic architecture, London, Trident, IPCC, IOPC
Related URLs:	Publisher
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Visual Cultures Visual Cultures > Centre for Research Architecture
Date:	4 August 2021
Funders:	Funding body Funder ID Grant Number European Research Council UNSPECIFIED 682313
Item ID:	32350
Date Deposited:	31 Oct 2022 11:33
Last Modified:	01 Nov 2022 13:25
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/32350

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