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“KNOW YOUR RIGHTS!” the mural trumpeted in capital letters. How had it escaped my attention? The artwork covered a brick wall abutting the twenty-four-hour Laundromat I passed every weekday morning on the walk to the children’s day care. A vision of tropical blues, it splashed out from the gritty gray surroundings, creating an illusion of depth. My eyes drank it in.

This mural operates like a comic strip in panels marrying image and text. In the first panel, a youngster is carded by a law enforcement official. In the second, a goateed man in a baseball cap is being handcuffed. In the third, a group of citizens stare evenly outward. One of them wears a look of disgust, and a T-shirt that says, “4th Amendment,” a sly allusion to the part of our constitution that protects us against unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause. Another holds his cell phone aloft to record what is happening on the street. “You have the right to film and observe police activity,” the mural states in Spanish, appropriate for a neighborhood where Spanish is the dominant language and where young men of color are regularly stopped and frisked by the police. In the lower left-hand corner the Miranda rights are paraphrased in English.

My first instinct was to take a picture of the mural so that I could carry it with me in my pocket. I was grateful for it, not only as a thing of beauty on the gallery of the street, but also as a kind of answer to the question that had been troubling us—how to inform our children about the harassment they might face. The mural struck me as an act of love for the people who would pass it by. I understood why it had been made, and why it had been made here in the hood next to a Laundromat as opposed to on Fifth Avenue next to Henri Bendel, Tiffany’s, or Saks. It was armor against the cruelty of the world. It was also a salve, to reclaim physical and psychic space. I wondered who had done it.

After some Internet sleuthing I discovered the painter was a Chilean artist who goes by the tag name Cekis, and that this mural was the first of several public artworks commissioned by a coalition of grassroots organizations called People’s Justice for Community Control and Police Accountability. The other Know Your Rights murals were spread out across four of New York City’s five boroughs (excluding Staten Island, where a great number of cops live) in poor neighborhoods most plagued by police misconduct. For the rest of that summer and into the fall, I photographed as many of them as I could, like a magpie collecting bright things for her nest.