Beneath the Surface

By Cai Thomas

Trina Reynolds-Tyler and the Labor of Uncovering

There is a kind of story that lives in silence. These are stories deliberately hidden inside systems, obscured by bureaucratic language, mislabeled in public records, or buried deep within data sets that were never meant to be read closely. They do not reveal themselves easily. They require people who know where to look and how to name what they find.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler is one of those people.

In the short documentary Beneath the Surface, Trina walks us through her work as a journalist and data analyst in Chicago, where she leads an investigation into gender-based violence hidden in police misconduct complaints. Her job is not only to sort through records but to see what has been deliberately obscured. She combs through mislabeled data, reads between inconsistent case descriptions, and names the patterns others have chosen to ignore. Her work exposes a painful reality: gendered violence by police officers is not rare, but it is constantly reframed and dismissed by the systems designed to absorb it.

Trina understands this terrain intimately. She reads records, sometimes thousands at a time, searching for the repetition that reveals truth. Her research connects cases of misconduct that have long been treated as isolated events. She shows how these acts of harm follow recognizable patterns that, once exposed, cannot be unseen. Her work demands a slow, deliberate kind of attention—the kind that data often discourages. The kind that requires care.

What emerges from her process is not just a clearer picture of police abuse in Chicago, but a call to rethink how harm is documented, categorized, and remembered. Trina does not treat data as neutral or inherently trustworthy. She treats it like a language shaped by the people who created it. She listens for what has been misnamed and reclaims the ability to name things accurately. The spreadsheet becomes a battleground. The archive becomes a site of recovery.

This work lives inside a long Black tradition of using whatever tools are available to tell a truer story. Trina builds on the legacy of Black women who have kept record, held memory, and refused erasure. She carries that legacy with a kind of quiet determination, rooted in her belief that information is a tool for transformation when it is wielded responsibly. The data she works with is not theoretical. It represents real people, real harm, real gaps in justice. She treats it accordingly.

The film places her work in context, situating it within a national movement for criminal justice reform. It is part of the Bridge Builders series from Independent Lens, which highlights organizers, researchers, and community leaders across the country. In Chicago, where political rhetoric around reform often masks stagnation, Trina’s work feels especially vital. It moves beyond symbolic change and focuses on the structural realities that keep harm in place.

Chicago’s history with policing is long and well-documented. Yet even with decades of protests, lawsuits, and federal interventions, the most vulnerable remain unheard. Trina’s research gives voice to survivors whose experiences have been overlooked by both policy and press. By naming what happened and showing how often it happens, she expands the possibilities for accountability.

The stories she uncovers are painful. They involve power being used without consent, authority being wielded with cruelty, and entire agencies turning their backs on the people they claim to protect. And still, the work continues. Trina does not turn away. She enters each case with the clarity that something can be done. That no one should have to carry their story alone.

This is the kind of labor that often goes unnoticed until it changes everything. The kind of labor that deserves to be recognized as essential. The kind of labor that builds the conditions for something else to grow in its place.

At Black Life Everywhere: Chicago, we understand this kind of labor as archive, as memory work, as care. Trina’s practice resonates with the values that guide this project. Her analysis, grounded in rigor and resistance, helps us see that truth-telling does not always come from loud voices or big platforms. Sometimes it arrives through a spreadsheet, a cluster of cells, a woman who knows how to read a system’s shadow.

The work beneath the surface is often the most powerful. It is where memory becomes map. Where harm becomes pattern. Where silence begins to break.

Learn more about Black Life Everywhere’s work here