Community invited to participate in art project at East Patrol Division 

For more information, contact: 
KCPD Media Unit
816-234-5170

Local artists have brought an interactive project to KCPD’s East Patrol Division to ask officers and members of the public to finish the statement, “All I want is ______.”

Kansas City Artists Charlie Mylie and Jori Sackin have partnered with police on a community art project they’re calling “The Big Board at East Patrol Division.” Kansas City residents are invited to come by East Patrol at 2640 Prospect Ave. from 3 to 6 p.m. today and Thursday and tell Mylie and Sackin how they would answer the prompt, “All I want is ________.” Mylie will illustrate several of the answers.

Participants are then invited to place their desire on a giant, magnetized, graph board in East Patrol’s lobby. The board has two axes on which participants can decide where their answer falls: ambiguous to specific and unachievable to achievable. Participants can put their answers where they think they should go, but others can move them around afterward.

“Then anyone who comes by can argue the placement of anyone else’s answer,” Sackin said. “That’s why they’re on magnets, so they can move. It’s a socially negotiated thing – we kind of decide what our words mean, but other people do, too.”

Residents who can’t make it by East Patrol Division also can post their response to “All I want is _____” on KCPD’s Facebook page or the artists’ event page and are encouraged to include the neighborhood they live in. LINKS Mylie and Sackin will place them on the board.

This is the second time Mylie and Sackin have done a “Giant Board” project. Their first was at a Kansas City bank earlier this year. KCPD officers spotted it there and thought it would be a great opportunity to invite community members to share their thoughts with police and vice versa in a fun and meaningful way, Captain Ryan Mills said. So they invited the artists to recreate the project at East Patrol. Police and other community members have so far contributed dozens of responses. The artists are keeping track of them. You can see some of them on the event page.

Sackin said he never envisioned the project would be at a police station, but once officers pitched it to him, he thought it was a great idea.

“One of the really good qualities of this project is it can take really contentious, hard-to-deal with issues and frame them in kind of a game,” he said. “It seems to diffuse some of the social anxiety about tense topics and makes a way to have a deeper conversation about them.”

Mylie, Sackin and Captain Mills will be available to speak with the media from 3 to 5 p.m. today, Oct. 12.