Isra Rahman began as a college intern with the Invisible institute in 2017, and in the years since has played a key role in our data expansion work in Illinois. As she concludes her work with us to begin law school, she shares a reflection with us on her time at the Invisible Institute.
For the past seven years I have been involved, in stints of various lengths, with the work of the Invisible Institute – from documenting and archiving materials for the Chicago Police Torture Archive, to tagging complaints on gender-based violence by the police, to learning and understanding FOIA by creating a (still unreleased) video on it, and finally by leading engagement around our Champaign-Urbana police database. The projects I have been lucky enough to take part are a small component of the work that happens at this organization, in shaping people and the way we think about safety and transparency.
During my second consecutive summer interning at Invisible Institute, I and two other amazing interns, Asha Futterman and Emma Perez, were sent to a 3-day conference held by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan from Just Practice Collaborative. The conference informed my worldview on how we handle harm as a society, and what that means both interpersonally and within the work we do as journalists reporting on policing. I carry this knowledge with me today as I interrogate the role of the law, and am grateful for the many ways staff at Invisible Institute informed my political ideology.
Since then, I have worked in other places more directly tied to advocacy and direct representation. While those spaces provided me with tools to tackle real material conditions, they did not offer the same rigorous approach to creativity and curiosity that I found at Invisible Institute The work cannot be separated from that at its core, and for those of us that want to do life-changing, world-building work, the way our employers treat us largely dictates our ability to function.
I remember distinctly speaking in the office on multiple occasions about the implications of our work given the structural and cyclical nature of police misconduct. It isn’t with ease that we do this work, but thoughtfulness and precision in speaking with people experiencing incredible harm by the state, and the mountains we move in trying to highlight and uplift those erased narratives. This work, and all the incredible people that have funneled into this office, is an experiment in taking state violence seriously while also recognizing our small role as journalists in the global struggles to end state violence.
It is in this process that my curiosity towards civil rights, direct representation, youth justice, and archival work deepened. For the past year and a half I have been grappling with the ways the Kalven v. Chicago precedent allows for police misconduct documents in and around Illinois to be public. Making these documents public via CPDP.co doesn’t mean that misconduct ends, but perhaps this tool may reaffirm people’s daily experiences with police and mobilize collective action. Our work in Champaign-Urbana, Joliet, and Chicago the past year has evolved and been informed by the strength of our relationships with people and the necessary act of building trust in order to understand the different ways police operate in communities separate from our own.
As I venture deeper into the law I hope to carry this practice around engagement, and building solutions with people, rather than creating demands for them. Many of us, journalists and attorneys, are parts of systems that uphold so much harm, and it is an imperative to find ways to do meaningful work in support of movement and justice despite that. The approach of Invisible Institute is one way of doing that, and I hope to find many more in the future as well.
I am affirmed less by how many people circulate our sites or how many awards we may or may not get for our reporting, but more when, in moments of questioning and violence by the state, people choose to turn to us as a resource, a sign that we are on their side and not against them. It’s that collaboration between people and trust that I hope to carry into the work I do in the future and continue to support Invisible Institute projects.
Isra Rahman
September 2024