Exploring the History of Policing & Confrontations with Police Power
researcher & writer · public historian · engaged scholar
Will Tchakirides is a historian who writes about how the state and invested publics have made and re-made police power in the 20th century city. His research focuses on legal and cultural foundations of police legitimacy at the local level, as well as how Black Americans, Latinx and white accomplices have collectively challenged state violence and re-imagined community safety free of police coercion and neglect.
Will is also a public historian with a decade of digital humanities, archives, and oral history experience. He has worked with universities and museums in Boston, Washington, DC, and Milwaukee. Will has collaborated on projects that have helped communities and organizations build more usable, complete interpretations of the past on their own terms. He currently assists on the Smithsonian Institution’s Our Shared Future: Reckoning with our Racial Past initiative.
