protests sweep across all 50 states
in the US. & many countries
abroad.

READ ALL ABOUT IT

   

"The rebellion in the cities, far from being an expression
of the inhumanity of blacks, is an affirmation of their
being despite the ever-present possibility of death."
James H Cone (Black Theology and Black Power)
foreword:

What is occurring in the country with these protests are an assertion of abolition-
ist sentiments into the mainstream. The country's gross incompetency in handling
COVID, allowing for mass unemployment and for disproportionate infection
rates and deaths in Black and Brown communities has caused social unrest. While
our healthcare workers and incarcerated community struggle to get PPE neces-
sary to surviving the pandemic, our police forces receive millions of dollars from
the state to brutalize our communities. All of this coupled with the highly publi-
cized state-sanctioned murder of George Floyd has sparked protests all over the
country calling for the devaluation of Black lives to cease. The government's mas-
sive failure to address the pandemic coupled with the highly publicized,
state-sanctioned murder of George Floyd has sparked protests all over the country.
Protestors are standing in solidarity with one-another, risking their lives, to
demand the ceasing of the criminalization of Black life. Yes, a cop killed George
Floyd but this was not due to the personal biases of one man.Rather, the police as
an institution exist to protect property: Black people were once property, a form of
property that allowed this country to amass and hoard an extravagant amount of
wealth through a system of racial capitalism. There is a direct link between slave
catchers/patrols and the police, as policing historically began as a system of slave
patrolling. Thus, police do not serve and protect human life, they serve the ruling
class and protect their wealth. The subjugation of Black people is ingrained into
the fabric of this country and it is ingrained into the police force. Black people are
frustrated, angry, sad, and all around OVER IT. Because of these reasons the pro-
tests occurring across the world are abolitionists. Chicago's began at Cook County
with calls to #FreeThemAll. At a national scale we are seeing calls to defund the
police and reinvest in Black communities. The tide is changing. The state is
responding with a high level of militarization and brualization because they sense
this change and know that together we have the numbers and the power to stop
the brutalization of our people.

She ie ie Gis Gs Sk GS AR SS GRR GS Gk eS
"James H. Cone spoke to America and said: I know that you are an ex-
emplary death-dodging and death-ducking culture, sentimental and
melodramatic. You come up with ingenious modes of denying and
evading and avoiding the underside of things. But there is some suffer-
ing here; there is some sadness and sorrow and heartache and heart-
break. There is some grief here, there are some doings and some ac-
tions here with which you must come to terms because 1968 has
reached the point now where the foundation of American civilization
has begun to shake.

" After 212 uprisings on the night that the bullets went through the pre-
cious body of Martin Luther King, Jr., America can no longer deny the
fact that either it comes to terms with the vicious legacy of white su-
premacy, or the curtain will fall on the precious experiment in democ-
racy called America.”

Cornel West, in his essay "Black Theology and Human Identity" which
reflects upon Cone's book Black Theology and Black Power.

West goes on to say that "Cone is dealing not just with the death of
Martin, nor just the death of so many freedom fighters of all colors,
though disproportionately black. He is also dealing with the death of
something in him; it is the death of the "Negro" and the birth of "black-
ness." It is the death of a certain kind of deferential disposition to white
supremacy in the hearts and minds and souls of black people them-
selves and the birth of a certain kind of self-assertiveness- a courage to

be."

Are we experiencing an awakening?

 
Timeline: George Floyd’s Death and

May
25th

26th
27th
28th
29th

June
1st

2nd

3rd

Impact
ABC News - June 3rd 2020

George Floyd Dies in Police Custody
-George Floyd, 46, is arrested shortly after 8 p.m.
after allegedly using a fake $20 bill at a local Cup
Foods. He dies while in police custody. A disturbing
cellphone video later posted to Facebook shows an
officer pinning Floyd to the ground with his knee
on Floyd’s neck while a handcuffed Floyd repeats “I
can’t breathe.” The video goes viral.
Responding Officers are fired as Pro-
tests begin in Minneapolis

Protests begin in other cities, including
Los Angeles and Memphis

Minnesota Governer Activates the Na-
tional Guard

An officer, Derek Chauvin, is arrested
and charged with third degree murder
in Floyd’s death

Results of an independent autopsy find
that Floyd’s death was due to asphyx-
iation - this runs contrary to the police
autopsy, which said the death was due to
underlying health conditions Floyd had

A Civil Rights Charge is filed against
Minneapolis Police

three more officers are charged for
aiding and abetting second degree murder.
Chauvin’s charge is adjusted to second de-
gree murder

What's next? Demonstrators continue to bat-
tle white supremacy and police brutality.
Groups call to defund, divest, and abolish po-
lice across the U.S. and abroad. Abolitionists
continue to call for the Abolition of prisons.
 

Seo

Pa .
ji . .
. ‘ v * e ebcopuye.
omaursmne Sy
Beouei’ -_
: 3 oes ry
o% sveonomane 866 1% unany .
ead =e ;
onvece a

           

° .
wore 00°] Scan” .° 5s
ee Oo e
fe WN xueoya ©
= @
wma gg aati
Sn e
; ,
said e ee
eS)
snag © ©
we a 2
ss < i o ry AD aMET eS @
ane >, ° i :
vonna gh : i :
sare
Pan re
4
< e ee ie
ee
ig . se! emmy emanagl
2
2 e
orcs

 

 

 

ysej01d Jo a11S

 
Why The Small Protests In Small Towns Across America Matter by Anne
Petersen

Dorian Miles arrived in Havre, Montana — a windy farm town, population 9,700, along what's
known as Montana's Hi-Line — just five months ago, a young man from Georgia coming to
play football for Montana State University-Northern. “I was nervous about walking around,”
he told the Havre Daily News. Like many small towns in Montana, Havre's population is aging
and, generally, friendly. But Miles, who told the paper his uncle had been shot and killed by a
police officer in Atlanta, knew that strolling its streets as a young black man with tattoos and
dreadlocks could be risky.
‘On Sunday night, though, he said he felt safe. Over 100 people showed up to a rally in Havre,
organized by Melody Bernard, a Chippewa Cree Tribal Member from the nearby Rocky Boy
Reservation.
After the rally, Miles posted photos and a message to Facebook. “SPEAK AND YOU WILL BE
HEARD!" he said. “Today we did what had to be done in Havre. A SMALL town of predomi-
nantly older white Americans stood with me to protest the wrongdoings at the hands of police
EVERYWHERE....Today we stood together for an injustice. Today people who don't look like
me or relate to me showed love and support. | was overwhelmed to see the people | saw today
marching in protest to the public lynchings that have been done by the only people whose job
is to PROTECT and SERVE their community.”
The movements and marches that convulse big cities don't usually (or ever) make it to Havre.
Nor do they usually make it to hundreds of other small towns across the country. But the
protests following the death of George Floyd, who was killed in police custody on May 25, are
different.
Allover the country, people are showing up — often for the first time in their lives — to protest
police brutality and injustice. In tiny ag towns like Havre and Hermiston, Oregon, but also in
midsize cities Topeka, Kansas, and Waco, Texas; on island hamlets (Friday Harbor, San Juan
Island; Nantucket, Massachusetts; Bar Harbor, Maine); and in well-to-do suburbs (Lake Forest
Park, Washington; Darien, Connecticut; Chagrin Falls, Ohio). They are showing up at the
courthouse. They are kneeling and observing eight minutes of silence — a reference to how
long Floyd was pinned to the ground in a knee chokehold by the Minneapolis police officer who
was later charged with his murder. They are marching down interstates and waving signs on
street corners. Sometimes, like in the town of Alton, New Hampshire (population 5,335), where
‘one woman organized a protest just two months after being hospitalized with COVID-19, only
seven people come. Sometimes, like in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, there are thousands.
These protests are covered by local news outlets, but amid the deluge of national news —
major protests in major cities, guard tanks and helicopters, tear gas and rubber bullets, looting
and destruction in select cities, the president's reaction, massive economic anxiety and unem-
ployment, all against the backdrop of the continued spread of COVID-19 — it's hard for these
stories of smaller, even silent, protests to break through.
When, for example, the New York Times compiled a map, published on June 1, of where pro-
tests had happened over the weekend, it missed dozens of protests across rural, small-town,
and midsize-town America. It's hard to fault them: My attempt to keep track has consumed the
last three days of my life, with people flagging more every hour.
There have been protests in Belfast, Maine. In Farmington, New Mexico. In Tuscaloosa, Ala-
bama. In Bentonville, Arkansas. In Lubbock, Texas. In Idaho Falls, Idaho. The biggest anyone
can remember in Paducah, Kentucky, in Bozeman, Montana, in Pendleton, Oregon, in Frisco,
Texas, and in Ogden, Utah. In Tacoma, Washington, pastors knelt in the rain, pleading with
God. In Bowling Green, Kentucky, three rolling days of protests. In Owatonna, Minnesota, a
student-led protest lasted for 10 hours. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, thousands gathered on the 99th
anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre. In Myers Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of
Charlotte, North Carolina, where black people were prohibited from owning property for de-
cades. And in Petal, Mississippi, where protesters have spent days calling for the resignation
of Mayor Hal Marx, who tweeted last week that “If you can talk, you can breathe.”
These protests cut across demographics and geographic spaces. They're happening in places
with little in the way of a protest tradition, in places with majority white population and majority
black, and at an unprecedented scale. People who've watched and participated in the Black
Lives Matter movement since 2015 say that this time feels different. And the prevalence of
these small protests is one of many reasons why.

Jordan Miller grew up in Carrollton, Ohio, a town of about 3200 people on the eastern side of
the state. When he graduated from high school, he was one of just 75 in his graduating class.
He's amassed a following of over 20,000 on Facebook covering news all over Ohio as local
news outlets are gutted. In the past week, he's documented protests and interviewed partici-
pants all over the state. On May 31, he was in New Philadelphia, whose population is just over
17,000, and hundreds had assembled to march. The county sheriff, Orvis Campbell, and his
deputies marched beside them.

“It was amazing,” he told me. “To see a town that is predominantly white come out in flocks
and march — they understood the importance. They can never understand the feeling of being
black in America. But they did understand that they could use their privilege to get the impor-
tance of protests out there.”

But he also went back to his hometown, where there were just two people protesting — and a
mass of people with guns strapped to their hips, “guarding” the buildings against them. One of
those men told Miller they were fine with him being there, because his family was “from” there.
They just didn’t want other black people, outsiders, around. That experience was dishearten-
ing, but only served to convince him how important these small-town protests are. ‘I'm black,
and | know the only reason I'm treated with any respect is because of my platform,” he said.
“Ive seen ‘outside’ black people treated differently than me. It's sad. | remember what it's ike
to be in their shoes.”

Still, he explained, the fact that even two people were protesting in his hometown, along with
so many others in nearby communities, makes everything feel “totally different.” “People's
thinking has evolved,” he said. “They want change just as much as the black community does.
Alliance, Ohio, population 21,646, is a 40-minute drive north from Carrollton. It's more than
80% white. Last week, Ande’ Green and Essence Blue had been watching protests pop up in
bigger cities nearby, but were wary of making the trip. Blue tweeted about potentially putting
something together in Alliance, and they decided to give it a shot. They made a flyer announc-
ing that they would gather at the post office downtown, then walk around it five times — once
for each time that George Floyd pleaded for his life. They posted the information all over social
media and texted everyone they knew.

“We didn't really know what to expect,” Green said. “But over 300 people showed up!”

“People didn’t understand the point of us protesting in Alliance,” she added. “But we wanted
them to know that we are taking a stand for our nation. For those who look like us who lose
their lives to police brutality.”

Tyler, Texas, is a town of 105,000 out on the eastern edge of the state. It's quiet, conservative,
and, according to Drew Steele, who works in auto detailing, a town of “quiet racists,” with litle
tolerance for anything or anyone that deviates from the norm. His high school was named for
Robert E. Lee. There's a brand-new building in town intended to commemorate plantation life.
There's a long history of lynching. But on Monday night, Steele joined hundreds of others for
the third night of protests in the city.

The protests in Tyler, he explained, are about so many things: institutional racism, but also
unlivable wages, and just growing frustration and desire for change.

Steele thinks it's essential for these protests to happen in places like Tyler — and for other
people to know about it. “Small towns tend to be old-fashioned,” he said. “And racism is an
old-fashioned way of controlling others.” But others need to know that there's another path
forward, and that its okay to be different, in any number of ways, “That's why it's so important
that so many people showed up,” he said. "We won't be shoved under the rug.

Riverton, population 11,000, is surrounded by the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming
Like a lot of towns that border Native American reservations — it can feel, as Steele put it,
“old-fashioned.” But on Monday, more than 150 people showed up to protest. Some were from

 
Riverton; others drove from the reservation and as far away as Lander. An older white woman
had written “THIS WYOMING NATIVE KNOWS BLACK LIVES MATTER’ on the back of her
T-shirt

In September 2019, a Riverton police officer shot and killed a Northern Arapaho man out-
side the local Walmart after he allegedly had attempted to stab the officer, giving new life to
long-standing complaints about the mistreatment of tribal residents by off-reservation police
(Native Americans are killed by police at a higher rate than any other ethnic group in the
United States.) In November, the city met with the Northern Arapaho tribal council to attempt
to improve relations between the two. But as Layha Spoonhunter, who is Eastern Shoshone,
Northern Arapaho, and Oglala Lakota, told me, there was significant skepticism and racism
from people in town

Spoonhunter decided to put together the event, along with Micah Lott, as a way to “bring

to light issues that we experience as people of color,” he said. He said the overwhelming
response from the city, where you still regularly see Confederate flags hung in windows and
in trucks, was positive. “There were people who shouted, ‘Hope you get the ‘rona,” he said.
“But most people honked in support, or raised their fist, or if we shouted ‘black lives matter’ or
‘justice for Floyd,’ they would open their windows and yell it back.”

“As Indigenous people, we wanted to stand in solidarity with Black Lives,” Lott told me. “We
put it on in Riverton, because of its older white conservative population and its prejudice
toward Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.”

In other towns, too, they keep showing up. Last night alone, there were protests planned in
Whitefish, Montana; in Gunnison, Colorado; in Pasco, Washington; in Brea, California; in
Cranford, New Jersey; in Albany, Oregon; in Bethel, Vermont; in Fairfield, Connecticut; in
Ketchum, Idaho; in Annapolis, Maryland; in Flagstaff, Arizona; and in dozens of other places,
large and small

It might not seem like people from outside care what happens in these places far from the
national spotlight. But as Ande’ Green, one of the organizers of the protest in Alliance, Ohio,
put it, “These small towns matter because it's a lot of small towns. All of these small towns
coming together, it's what we need to make a change.”

Or, as Melody Bernard, who organized the protest in northern Montana, said, “Protests like
these need to happen in places like Havre because racism and injustice happen in places
like Havre. There's complaints, maybe some meetings, and then it dies down. People forget it
about it and then it happens again. But we can't let it die down this time. We just have to keep
pushing.”

June 4, 2020, at 10:42 a.m.
Correction: Riverton is surrounded by the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming. Its
relation to the reservation was misstated in a previous version of this post.
Who Will You Believe, de Blasio or Your Lying Eyes?
By Sarah Jones

Bill de Blasio didn’t have a good morning, and that's fair, because neither did I or
anyone else in his city. When he showed up as usual for Brian Lehrer’s weekly “Ask
‘The Mayor” segment, the venerable WNYC host asked him some thrilling questions.
“T think there is one dominant topic for you this week,” Lehrer said. “It seems, from
alot of reporting, that the city has a problem of the protests against too much police
violence being met with too much police violence, or heavy-handed police tactics. Do
you accept the premise?”
“Noy” the mayor said. People are deeply hurt, he added. ‘There's anger. There’s pain.
‘There are problems in policing we all have to fix. But minus a few unfortunate inci-
dents, he continued, “the police have shown a lot of restraint” Citing reality, Lehrer
pushed back. Here's all the reporting, he told the mayor. But the mayor dug in. No, no,
no. Not happening, not here.

De Blasio’s New York, where the cops are good apples and looters and protesters are
one and the same, is more than a fantasy. It’s a lie. The real topography of this city is
shaped by police violence. You can walk its streets and point out the primary features
of note. Here’s where the police killed Eric Garner. Here's where they killed Sean Bell,
Anthony Baez, Ramarley Graham, Patrick Dorismond. Here is where Amadou Diallo’s
old building is; the police murdered him in front of it. Here’s where they raped Anna
Chambers in custody. In the week since protests over George Floyd’s killing began, the
police have added indelible new landmarks to our map. The mayor pretends not to see
them.

Maybe he needs an itinerary. Load him into one of those double-decker tourist buses,
Jet him sit up top, and haul him around. The cops broke a protester’s arm here. On this
street they shoved a young woman to the ground so hard she had a seizure. Or take
him to the Strand. Great bookstore. A cop pulled a gun on unarmed protesters in front
of it. Drive him to the corner of St. Marks and Flatbush. There, he can see the spot
where the NYPD drove an SUV into a crowd. Escort him over the Manhattan Bridge.
‘The other night, the police trapped thousands of people on it for hours.

He can come to my neighborhood if he wants. I'll show him around. A week ago I
walked out of my apartment and up Tompkins Avenue and found myself in a protest.
You can do that now, in New York. Walk to Walgreens, there's a protest. Walk up East-
ern Parkway, protest. The mayor gets driven places so perhaps he doesn't see them. ‘The
protests are peaceful, and so was the local crowd last Friday. People had gathered in
front of the 79th Precinct to be heard. They succeeded, for a while. Then, for no reason
I could ascertain, the police flooded toward us from across the street. In front of them
they held their batons, cross-body, ready to push. They pushed and shoved and hit
even when we all tried to comply. After the pushing started a protester threw a water
bottle at a cops head, which seemed like a natural response to being threatened, and
the cops got even angrier with those batons. Some of them were restrained but some of
them enjoyed it and you could see it on their faces.
‘The next night, a Saturday, I went out again. The mayor was not present and did not
see anything. But here’s what I saw. For the second night in a row, the police turned a
calm demonstration into dangerous mayhem. They charged a crowd in the streets near
the Barclays Center. I don’t know why. Once again there was no provocation that I wit-
nessed. They rushed protesters down the street, spraying mace, wielding batons. I saw
people on the ground. I heard my fiancé, who had come to march, scream my name
from the sidewalk and that frightened me, because he’s a former Marine and doesn't
easily startle. He reached out and tried to pull me toward him. I'd turned my back to
the cops, thinking I'd outrun them and the mace and the sticks. I had come to stand on
a curb out of their way. But a cop approached from behind, baton raised, ready to push
me down or shove me even further down the street. Not far from where we stood, the
police had just arrested HuffPost reporter Chris Mathias.

Thave since acquired a press badge. ‘The item feels like a good-luck charm, its protec-
tive qualities a comforting fiction. The police don’t care about the First Amendment,
which protects protesters and reporters alike. Neither does de Blasio, who with his
curfews intends to remove a peaceful protest movement from his streets. The impulse
to restrict speech, to restrict movement and assembly, is antidemocratic to the core. So
too are de Blasio’ lies. In an ideological sense he may have no choice but to pretend.
The alternative is to concede that he, a good liberal who thought he could be president,
fosters violent authoritarianism at home.

But here's the truth, which will be the truth whether or not de Blasio admits it to Brian
Lehrer. ‘The police have arrested legal observers and journalists and peaceful protest
ers. They've beaten people savagely, almost killed a few with a car, and terrorized entire
neighborhoods. They have incited violence where none flourished, and a few oppor-
tunistic looters don't substantively bolster the police commissioner's version of events.
‘The police are brutalizing people, the way they always have, except now it’s even harder
for the comfortable among us to ignore. It’s all on video, night after night. We see it.
We won't forget it. We don't live in de Blasio’s New York.
“Images and video circulating on social media show police officers who ap-
pear to have either taped over the name tags on their uniforms and badge star num-
bers or removed them entirely.

Concealing those elements of a uniform, or failing to correctly identify them-
selves, is specifically prohibited by at least two Chicago Police directives.

But the Reporter has obtained images and video that suggest multiple CPD offi-
cers may have been engaging in the inappropriate practice of hiding their names star
numbers, which are the unique identifying numbers on an officer’s badge.”

-The Chicago Reporter, June 4th, 2020

“The practice of police obscuring their badge numbers — a form of identification
that many jurisdictions require officers to make available to the public when interact-
ing — has taken on a heightened significance amid the nationwide protests over the
killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. The protests have been met with a show
of force from officers, sometimes veering into brutality, leaving the risk that those
without visible identification are acting with the very impunity to commit violence that
spurred the protests in the first place.

Covering badge numbers, the National Lawyers Guild letter asserts, ‘serves to
prevent aggrieved individuals from being able to identify the perpetrators of police
misconduct or relevant witnesses to same, and the failure of the NYPD to stop this
practice provides a sense of impunity to members of the service that they can violate
demonstrators’ rights without consequence.’

Andy Izenson, president of the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers
Guild, who signed the letter, told The Intercept that covering badge numbers was par-
ticularly troubling during a time of widespread protest when documented police vio-
lence is already a problem.

‘The trend of individual officers to sidestep what minimal accountability
exists, in order to more effectively and with greater impunity brutalize pro-
testers for pretextual reasons, is unacceptable,’ Izenson said. ‘Not only along
legal standards, but for moral ones as well.’ The fact that the practice appears not
only to be the individual act of specific cops, but an acknowledged pattern tolerated
within the department, could make the city — and not just individual officers — an-
swerable to a lawsuit, according to the National Lawyers Guild. ‘The failure to stop this
activity also may subject the City to liability,’ Izenson wrote.

The police department’s Patrol Guide permits the wearing of black bands for
short periods after an officer’s death, but forbids officers from using those bands to
obscure their badge number.”
- The Intercept

 

 
  

CIVIL UNREST IN the wake of George Floyd's death has
spread around the world, and in some places, protesters are
being met with tear gas, rubber bullets, stun guns, and other
tactics intended to control crowds without taking lives.

Known as nonlethal or less-lethal weapons, many of these
tactics were originally pitched as a way to make warfare more
humane by incapacitating a person or encouraging them to
flee. Law enforcement agencies later adopted these weapons
from the military as an alternative to using firearms.

Yet people who study nonlethal weapons wonder if a
reclassification is in order, as research continues to reveal
their damaging ramifications on the body. When misused,
these weapons break bones, burn the skin, and cause internal
injuries that can be fatal.

CHEMICAL ATTACKS

During the coronavirus pandemic, the use of tear gas may
be particularly disastrous. When victims are hit with the
weapon, it causes fits of coughing and sneezing—a potentially
potent recipe for spreading the virus.

The active agent in tear gas is an organic compound called
CS, which binds to a pain receptor in our nerves named
TRPA1. This pain sensor is located all over the body—eyes,
skin, lungs, mouth—and is responsible for the zesty sensation
triggered while eating wasabi or horseradish.

These chemical irritants are considered nonlethal in open
environments and at low concentrations.
But in large doses—administered when they detonate next to
someone or in a confined space—the chemicals can kill tissue in
the airway and digestive system, fill the lungs with excess fluid,
and cause internal bleeding.

In addition to risk from tear gas itself, there are the metal,
aerosolized canisters it comes in. Balin Brake, a 21 year-old
protester in Indiana, lost an eye during a protest over the
weekend, where he says he was struck in the head by a tear gas
canister. The disorientation and panic that comes with tear gas
can also cause stampedes, as happened in a Venezuelan night
club in 2018, where 17 people died.v

Like other chemical weapons, tear gas was banned in almost
every country for use in warfare under the Chemical Weapons
Convention treaty ratified in 1997, but it’s still commonly used in
many places to control crowds, and not only at protests. In 2018,
civil rights groups condemned US Border Patrol agents for using
tear gas on a group of unarmed migrants, including children

Pepper spray, based on a compound called oleoresin
capsicum (OC) that can also be used in grenades, behaves ina
similar way, but is less likely than Tear gas to cause chemical
burns.

RUBBER BULLETS

In 1970, the British army
introduced rubber bullets as
a tool to control riots in
Northern Ireland. Made of
rubber—and, in some cases,
rubber-coated steel—these
projectiles were designed
to be less lethal than metal
bullets. Their larger surface
areas slow their pace during flight, allowing them to administer
blunt force to the body, rather than penetrate it.

Studies of their use in the conflict in Kashmir have shown that
rubber bullets can cause fractures, nerve and tendon injuries, and
infections. Other studies indicate that rubber bullets can cause
internal organ damage leading to death or permanent disability.
This week, a Sacramento teen was hit in the face with a rubber
bullet that broke his jaw and left a gash across his cheek.

 
The United Nations Human Rights Guidance on
Less-Lethal Weapons in Law Enforcement recommends only
using rubber bullets when facing imminent threats—and
aiming at the lower abdomen or legs, where they are more
likely to cause bruises and lacerations.

But when shot at close range, rubber bullets cause
damage on par with a car accident. The blunt force can break
bones and crush or tear the blood vessels in the area of
impact—which can cause bleeding in nearby organs, such as
the kidneys, spleen, or liver.

Rubber bullets have been used to target the media as well
Freelance photographer Linda Tirado was shot in Minneapolis
by what she believes was a rubber bullet, permanently
blinding her in one eye. In Louisville, Kentucky, local reporter
Kaitlin Rust shouted, “I’m getting shot! I’m getting shot!” on
live television while a police officer targeted her and
photojournalist James Dobson with what appeared to be
rubber bullets or pepper balls, projectiles containing skin and
eye irritants.

Weaponized Noise

Military helicopters hovered low over protesters in
Washington, D.C., on Monday night, sending debris flying and
leaving people covering their ears. Meanwhile, police forces
across the country—including Seattle, Houston, Portland, and
Denver—exploded flash-bangs, so called for the way they
emit a loud bang and bright lights as they detonate.

Noise is a common tactic for clearing people out of an
area, says Richard Neitzel, an associate professor at the
University of Michigan School of Public Health who studies
the effects of noise exposure. Aside from being irritating,
noise can harm the body in two ways, both of which target the
inner ear.

Brief, intense blasts emit high pressure waves that enter
the ear and hit the eardrum. Like putting too much air in a
balloon, this can rupture the eardrum and dislodge the tiny
bones connecting it to the inner ear. The pressure can even
shear off the hair cells lining the inner ear that are responsible
for transforming vibrations into signals the brain interprets as
sound.
Hovering helicopters might be as loud as an outdoor
concert—95 decibels—enough to cause damage after about
50 minutes. But Neitzel says a few minutes’ exposure brings
no real risk of hearing loss. More concerning, he says, are
the potential effects of flash-bang grenades. These emit
sounds upward of 170 decibels, which can cause immediate
ear injury to anyone standing nearby—a risk that increases
with the number of explosions. Neitzel notes, though, that ear
plugs will help mitigate some of these effects.

Stun Guns

Stun guns have been a method of quelling—and
inciting—unrest since the 1960s, when law enforcement used
rudimentary versions of the devices on civil rights activists.
These guns deliver short blasts of electric current to the body
and are designed to subdue assailants just long enough to
restrain them. But they, too, can be lethal.

These weapons shoot two barbed darts sharp enough to
penetrate the clothes and skin and embed themselves into
the body’s tissue. The darts connect to very fine wire that
transmits five-second blasts of energy. To complete a circuit,
the electricity travels from one dart to the other through body
tissue. As it does so, it stimulates the skeletal muscles to
twitch so fast, it’s like having a seizure.|f the darts hit the
wrong parts of the body, these weapons can cause cardiac
arrest.

Rohini J. Haar, an emergency medicine physician at the
Kaiser Medical Center in Oakland and a lecturer at UC
Berkeley's School of Public Health who has studied the use
of crowd-control arms, says scrutinizing the weapons that
police are using to control protesters shouldn't distract from
why the demonstrations are happening in the first place.
Excessive use of crowd-control weapons is ultimately a
symptom of the very issue that has driven thousands into the
streets: unaccountable police violence, especially toward
black people. “The protesters are protesting police violence,
and that’s really the focus here,” says Haar. “I hope that the
attention stays on that.”

~ Amy Mckeever of Nat Geo and
Louise Matsakis of Wired
Dozens of cities across the country are imposing
curfews. Do they work? by Zeesham Aleeem

‘These protests have grown in size and intensity leading officials in at least 39 cities and coun-
ties across 21 states to institute curfews. But some criminologists have reservations about
curfews, particularly given the scarcity of research about their effectiveness — and warn the
curfews currently being instituted could backfire,

In many cities — including Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Reno, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles
— protesters defied those curfews on Saturday, meaning protests, including some featuring
violence on the part of police and agitators, continued. And that police made arrests not only
for criminal acts like theft and arson, but also for violating curfew.

In some cities, those who stayed out were allowed to continue their protests; in others, how-
ever, defying curfews led to aggressive behavior from police, like in Minneapolis, where police
fired rubber bullets at demonstrators and journalists. ‘The fact that some of Saturday's curfews
provoked this violent police response, and that other curfews were ignored, raises questions
about the wisdom and efficacy of ordering a curfew in the first place.

It is unclear whether ordering emergency curfews — that is, telling people they must stay at
home and avoid public areas after a certain time in the evening, and increasing public police
presence to enforce it — is effective in reducing unrest, Criminologists note there doesn't
appear to be an abundance of research on the matter. But some experts have raised concerns
about the way curfews are likely to be enforced in communities of color and argue they could
exacerbate the very dynamics that gave rise to the unrest in the first place: namely, that they
will encourage confrontational policing at a time when people are demanding the opposite.
“What we know is curfews increase opportunities for police interaction and police violence
over time)’ Andrea Ritchie, a criminal justice researcher at the Barnard Center for Research
‘on Women, told me.

‘The surge in curfews and increased deployment of law enforcement officers over the week-
‘end — some of which extend through Monday morning — reflect an intensifying effort by
government authorities to curb the protests that have rocked the country for days and have
revived an ongoing discussion about racial discrimination in the American criminal justice
system,

‘The curfews that most local officials have sought have been extremely short-term — some
began on Saturday at 8 pm and ended at 6 am Sunday. But others resume on Sunday night and
last until Monday morning, Should unrest continue in the coming days or weeks, it’s possible
a number of government officials will turn again to curfews — and some experts are con-
cerned about how they could be enforced.

While there is a great deal of scholarship on the efficacy of extended juvenile curfews on re-
ducing crime in the US, that same breadth of research does not exist on sweeping, short-term.
curfews, according to experts.

William Ruefle, a scholar of criminology at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, told
Time in 2015 that there's been very little research into the topic, and that does not appear to
have changed in the past few years. Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology and the coordinator
of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, told me he “[doesn't] know that
there is a lot of research on emergency curfews during rioting”

But Vitale did note that there are a number of widely held concerns about the effect curfews
have on the public.
“Curfews are an extremely blunt tool that should only be used sparingly and as a last result.
‘They give police tremendous power to intervene in the lives of all citizens” he said. “They
pose a huge burden on people who work irregular hours, especially people of color in service
professions who may need to travel through areas of social disturbance in order to get to and
from work at night”

      

    

 

 
UPRISINGS CON-
TINUE FROM
MAY 26TH INTO
SECOND MONTH

read all about it

   

We are making the future as well
as bonding to survive the enormous
Pressures of the present, and that is
what it means to be a part of histo-
ry. -Audre Lorde “Learning from the
60s”
i,
“eae”

As uprisings continue well into July, we are seeing calls to defund po-
lice departments across the country. Defunding of course with the goal
to abolish them entirely. While some of these calls are met with efforts
to defund departments we are also witnessing tactics that are offered
with the hope to placate our demands for abolition with minor aesthetic
alterations to the face of our subjugation. Symbolic efforts such as re-
naming streets named after confederates, painting BLM in major road-
ways, or various police reform efforts are individual solutions to system-
ic issues. As we see the parameter for leftists’ political beliefs shift we
also see, in real time, abolition get co-opted by various non profits and
career activists who simply want to co-opt our efforts for their personal
gain. This was clearly seen in the 8cantwait campaign which switched
gears to include watered down abolitionist talking points following the
release of the 8toabolition campaign. It is our responsibility to keep our
demands on track to abolition and to ensure that neoliberalism does
not sink its nasty claws into our movement. The country’s mishandling
of the pandemic, allowing for massive unemployment and civil unrest,
cannot be understated for creating the conditions that have allowed the
uprisings to continue into their second full month. As they continue it
is important to ground ourselves in the work of those who came before
us while also recognizing the innovation this unique moment allows for.
As Black Lives Matter becomes a phrase that most are now comfortable
saying we must ask ourselves:what are we grounding ourselves in?
Should our efforts be focused on showing the White public that we have
humanity or should we be focused on building Black Power? Our work
needs to center those who are still on the margins of the larger Black
Lives Matter movement such as incarcerated folk, women cis & trans
alike, the queer community, disabled folk, non citizens and many others.
As those living within the American empire we also need to ensure our
efforts include all colonized people, especially those for which imperi-
alism is a harsh reality. Abolition is a global project. Thus the domestic
and international struggles are inextricably linked. Efforts to support
our communities through the uprisings and the pandemic are efforts we
need to sustain after this moment. We need to build autonomy through
mutual aid, jail support, community pantries and other efforts that will
allow communities to sustain radical movements.

SP,
“eae”

“Our revolution is not a public-speaking tournament. Our revolution is
not a battle of fine phrases. Our revolution is not simply for spouting
slogans that are no more than signals used by manipulators trying to
use them as catchwords, as codewords, as a foil for their own display.
Our revolution is, and should continue to be, the collective effort of rev-
olutionaries to transform reality, to improve the concrete situation of the
masses of our country.” -Thomas Sankara

 

 
#8toAbolition

While communities across the country mourn the loss of
George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Jamel Floyd,
and so many more Black victims of police murder, Campaign
Zero released its 8 Can't Wait campaign, offering a set of
eight reforms they claim would reduce police killings by 72%.

As police and prison abolitionists, we believe that this
campaign is dangerous and irresponsible, offering a slate of
reforms that have already been tried and failed, that mislead
a public newly invigorated to the possibilities of police

and prison abolition, and that do not reflect the needs of
criminalized communities.

 

We honor the work of abolitionists who have come before
us, and those who organize now. A better world is possible.
We refuse to allow the blatant co-optation of decades of
abolitionist organizing toward reformist ends that erases
the work of Black feminist theorists. As the abolitionist
organization Critical Resistance recently noted, 8 Can’t Wait
will merely “improve policing’s war on us.” Additionally,
many abolitionists have already debunked the 8 Can't Wait
campaign's claims, assumptions, and faulty science.

Abolition can’t wait.

The end goal of these reforms is not to create better,
friendlier, or more community-oriented police or prisons.
Instead, we hope to build toward a society without police
or prisons, where communities are equipped to provide for
their safety and wellbeing.

source: www.8toabolition.com
To build an abolitionist world that prioritizes the lives of
Black people, we have drawn upon decades of abolitionists’
work to compile this list of demands targeted toward
city and municipal powers. Honoring the long history of
abolitionist struggle, we join in their efforts to divest from
the prison industrial complex, invest in our communities, and
create the conditions for our ultimate vision: a world without
police, where no one is held in a cage, and all people thrive
and be well.

#8TOABOLITION
A WORLD WITHOUT PRISONS OR POLICE,
WHERE WE CAN ALL BE SAFE

DEFUND THE DEMILITARIZE REMOVE POLICE FREE PEOPLE FROM
POLICE COMMUNITIES FROM SCHOOLS PRISONS & JAILS

[| ue |||

WE BELIEVE IN A WORLD WHERE THERE ARE
ZERO POLICE MURDERS BECAUSE THERE ARE ZERO POLICE.

 

REPEAL LAWS INVEST IN PROVIDE SAFE INVEST IN CARE,
CRIMINALIZING COMMUNITY HOUSING FOR NOT COPS
SURVIVAL ‘SELF-GOVERNANCE EVERYONE

ABOLITION CAN’T WAIT.

source: www.8toabolition.com
Caught In De Blasio’s Curfew, Essential Worker Spends Week Inniail
After NYPD Mass Arrests Bronx Protesters
BY JAKE OFFENHART june 11, 2020

It wasn’t yet curfew when the cops trapped Devaughnta Williams.
After clocking out at his job as a janitor at a city social services
building on Thursday evening, the 27-year-old Bronx native planned
to take the subway to his grandmother's to get a few hours of sleep,
before starting the graveyard shift at Family Dollar. The exact time
shouldn’t have mattered — as an essential worker, he was permitted
to be out past 8 p.m. — but he was still hyper-aware of the hour.
“I’m walking up the block and I bump into a crowd of protesters at
7:24 p.m.,” Williams told Gothamist. “I said, ‘You know what, I have
time.”

Williams said he had been marching with the South Bronx group for
only a few minutes when the NYPD cornered them. Moments before
curfew, o!cers in riot gear charged from both sides, refusing to let
the crowd disperse as they beat

protesters with nightsticks and choked the air with pepper spray.
More than 250 people were arrested in the attack, Williams among
them. “I am an essential worker,” Williams (who also goes by Chi-
na) pleaded, as he was loaded onto a Department of Correction bus
with dozens of other cuffed protesters. The arresting o!cers, he said,
refused to acknowledge the piece of paper indicating his post-curfew
privileges.

A week later, Williams is still incarcerated. He was initially taken to
an NYPD holding cell in Queens, where he said he did not receive
water, food or phone access for eighteen hours. On Friday after-
noon, he was transferred to the Manhattan Detention Complex in
Lower Manhattan.

For his brief participation in the protest, Williams was charged with
multiple parole violations. According to the Department of Correc-
tions and Community Supervision (DOCCS), he allegedly “failed to
obey the 8:00 p.m. Mayoral Executive ordered curfew.” He was also
accused of ignoring law enforcement directions and gathering with
a group that was allegedly “throwing plastic bottles with unknown
liquid while screaming and yelling.”

Speaking to Gothamist by phone from the Manhattan jail on
Wednesday night, Williams said he witnessed no destruction or bot-
tle-throwing during the protest — confirming multiple firsthand re-
ports that stand in stark contrast to the NYPD’‘s claims of imminent
violence. He added that he would never have joined a protest that
wasn’t peaceful, especially while out on parole. This past March,
Williams completed a nine year prison sentence stemming from his
conviction for a robbery as a teenager.

“I’m just thinking about staying out of jail,” he told Gothamist. “I

 
got three jobs. I got two kids. I’m trying to be an upstanding mem-
ber of society.” The swelling movement against racist policing is
deeply personal for Williams. Growing up in the Bronx, he said, his
best friend was Ramarley Graham, the 18- year-old Bronx teenager
who was fatally shot in his own bathroom by an NYPD

officer in 2012. “Ramarley used to sleep at my house. This was

like my brother,” Williams said. “I was in prison when he died. My
daughter was born 15 days later. I still remember the name of the
o!cer who shot him: Richard Haste”

O!cer Haste ultimately resigned from the police force after he was
found guilty during a department trial. Federal prosecutors declined
to bring charges against him, and he faced no criminal penalty for
the killing.

For Williams, his own re-incarceration has served as a bitter re-
minder of the racist double-standards inherent in New York’s crim-
inal justice system. “It’s stressful to be back here, especially when
I know I was doing everything correctly,” he said. “I’m a black man
with dreads so automatically I’m pointed out as a criminal.”

A recent report from Columbia University’s Justice Lab found that
black city residents are jailed for parole violations at a rate 12 times
higher than white people. Overall, New York State re-incarcerates
more parolees for technical violations — such as breaking curfew or
smoking weed — than any other state except Illinois.

“His situation is a classic example of what people face every day in
the Bronx — people get violated on bullshit here all the time,” said
Chino May, an activist with the group Take Back the Bronx, which is
planning a rally calling for Williams’s freedom on Friday.

“This parole violation, like many others, underscores just how coun-
terproductive New York’s parole violation system is to the purported
goals of parole supervision: to support successful re-entry,” echoed
Laura Eraso, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society. “A violation
like the one Mr. Williams is facing undermines the critical bonds that
serve to empower his successful reentry back into his community.”
With her husband locked up, each day has brought more challenges
for Tashana Perkins, a welfare case worker with the city’s Human
Resources Administration. On top of her job, she’s raising two chil-
dren, ages 3 and 8, who are currently enrolled in remote learning
because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Even though he works all night, he’d go into their room in the
morning in straight dad mode,” Perkins told Gothamist of her hus-
band. “It’s really heartbreaking because the kids keep asking for
him. That’s the hardest part, telling the kids he’s going to come
home, but I don’t know when he’s going to come home.”

In an unattributed statement shared with Gothamist on Thursday,

a spokesperson for DOCCS defended the week-long detainment of

  
Williams, claiming that he was cited by an arresting o!cer for being
out past curfew. A subsequent investigation by DOCCS, however,
confirmed that Williams was not involved in throwing objects or oth-
er destruction.

“Therefore, given the investigating o!cers’ findings, as well as the
totality of the circumstances regarding the event, a decision was
made to vacate the warrant,” the statement read. “He is expected
to be released today.”

DOCCS did not respond to inquiries from Gothamist about why an
essential worker like Williams was jailed at all. The spokesperson
also did not say how many other parolees were re-incarcerated for
alleged violations of de Blasio’s curfew.

The Mayor's O!ce, the NYPD, and the Governor’s O!ce all did not re-
spond to requests for comment. As of Thursday afternoon, Williams
still had not been released.

UPDATE: Williams was released from custody at 11:30 p.m. on
Thursday, more than twelve hours after DOCCS completed their
investigation. He is now at home with his family.
I Saw My Friends Beaten by Police. This Is What Happens
When Cities Priortize Property Over Black Lives.
Todd St Hill
June 14 2020

As city after city began to rise up demanding an end to racist police
brutality particularly toward Black people, I knew — as everyone
with eyes and ears knew — that it was only a short mat- ter of time
before Chicago had its own explosion in response to the horrific mur-
der of George Floyd. The Chicago Police Department is no strang-

er to police murder of Black people, racism, or corruption; it is the
model for corruption and racist policing in the U.S., making na- tion-
al and international headlines for its historic crimes against hu- man-
ity, racist murders of unarmed Black youth, use of black sites, and
its ability to garner government oversight.

On May 31, the third day of protests, I woke up to a city entering
what felt like full lockdown. The news was reporting that the bridges
con- necting downtown Chicago with the north side of the city had
been raised, cutting off the city from scenes of destroyed property.
By the end of the day, the mayor would announce via tweets that
the city’s downtown would be under restricted access to “free up re-
sources and allow supplemental support into neighborhoods.” How-
ever, that morning the “resources” and “supplemental support” came
in the form of hundreds of police on foot and in SUVs and helicopters
cir- cling above. The National Guard would be called in next to set up
checkpoints.

After listening to nonstop sirens and helicopters from the window of
my Southside apartment for 30 minutes, I decided to take a walk. As
I headed up 47th — a street that is littered with local businesses — I
saw two storefronts had been broken into. Police were everywhere,
aggressively moving neighborhood residents off of their own block.
It was not at all like what I had seen in news reports: police roaming
the city’s wealthier and whiter downtown loop rounding up “vandals”
and “looters.” Later that day, I attended an organizing meeting with
other activists and organizers from surrounding neighborhoods, the
vast majority of whom had been involved in grassroots organizing
for the Black Lives Matter Movement. We heard about a march near-
by. As it approached, a few of us decided to join the peaceful protest
as it made its way east, through Hyde Park and toward the lake.

It ended peacefully, just shy of Lake Shore Drive: the major artery
that runs along the lake- front. As the protesters attempted to head
back west, to their cars and to public transit, the police formed a

line preventing us from dis- persing. When protesters insisted, still
nonviolently, the police began to push us back with their batons. As I
turned, I saw police beating and tossing one of my friends around as
my friend was pleading with him to calm down. As protesters were
being attacked by police, oth- ers attempted to pull them out of
harm’s way. This would not be

the last time this group of police would attack us.

After about a 90-minute standoff with the CPD, they finally let down
their line. But as we approached a corridor of storefronts on 53rd
Street, the police, who had themselves been dispersing, began to
turn one by one and run toward us. As I approached the intersec-
tion I saw our friend tripped by a police officer. Within seconds,

he was being beaten relentlessly by a group of five or six officers.
More police showed up, as bystanders and protesters shouted at
the police to stop. Two others from our group jumped on top of our
friend, using their bodies to shield him from the melee of baton hits
and receiving their fair share of the beating in the process. Another
member of our group jumped on top of her fiancé in an attempt to
shield him from the ba- ton blows.

In total, five Black people were beaten into hospitalization by the
Chicago Police Department officers. The four who were arrested all
suffered concussions, broken bones, cuts and bruises. One person
needed immediate medical attention for his head wounds and was
re- leased to the custody of the street medics who attended the
march. A protester was pepper-sprayed for filming the attack by
police. A friend was pushed in front of a moving police cruiser by a
CPD offi- cer, and I was also pushed to the ground as I ran to pull
her from in front of the SUV. This is only a fraction of the thousands
of protesters who have no doubt been assaulted; beaten; made to
endure sexist, ho- mophobic, and/or transphobic slurs; and had
their rights to legal aid denied all for simply being willing to defend
Black life from the ongo- ing violence from the police. That night,
into the following day, news began to spread quickly that protesters
in Chicago were being disappeared into the jails, unheard from for
many hours, their right to a lawyer and phone calls withheld and
their requests for masks denied — despite the fact that many jails
are Covid-19 hotspots. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot lauded the pro-
testers’ anger as righteous on social media and has said the restric-
tions and National Guard checkpoints were there to protect Chicago-
ans. In actuality, the municipal restrictions went hand in hand with
police violence and impunity. The restrictions, which in- cluded the
mayor's decision to end the grab-and-go lunch program provided to
public school students amid the Covid-19 lockdown, cou- pled with
overwhelming presence of police resembled a form of col- lective
punishment more than a strategy for protection of protesters — and
an effort to protect the property of the rich downtown. The surge of
police in Black neighborhoods and debilitating restrictions evoked
disturbing memories of the scarcity that existed in Black com- mu-

  
nities around the time of the 2008 recession and some many times
before that. Lightfoot’s derision of so-called rioters illustrates a
repug- nance of the equation of property — of buildings, of brick
and mortar — to Black life. To us, it only reinforced what is at the
root of the anti-Blackness that the country has risen up to protest
against: racial capitalism. After all, one cannot amass the wealth of
a billionaire without engaging in and upholding racism.

As the demand to defund police departments spreads

across the country, the contradictory response from liberal and cen-
trist mayors professing progressive politics is becoming more and
more visible. Lightfoot deployed hyperaggressive police in riot gear,
particularly in Black neighborhoods, to violently clamp down anti-
racist protesters of police violence even as she praised them. Pro-
test and uprisings — like the vote, like the strike — are tools

that belong to the people. They are just as important to a democra-
cy as any other political tool at the disposal of the peo- ple, and for
Black people uprisings and protest have been powerful tools in the
fight for Black liberation.

In lock step with proposals from Democratic Party leadership, May-
or Lightfoot’s proposals for police reform are an evasion of the
demands for defunding of the Chicago Police Department, offering
a “wellness” program and more funding for police as opposed to
relief for Black communities and communities of color terrorized

by law enforce- ment for generations and who most recently bore
the brunt of the U.S. government's failure to contain the Covid-19
outbreak.

What the mayor fails to realize is that the calls for defunding the
po- lice are not only about reining in their overwhelming authority,
pow- er, and resources. The demands to defund the police flow from
a now undeniable fact that Black people continue to be abused and
exploit- ed by a system that uses policing to violently contain, con-
trol, and concentrate that brutality on Black communities and other
communi- ties of color. Moreover, the demands to defund and even
disband po- lice departments are a call to divest from institutions
that harm Black people, chief among them police and prisons. The
demand to defund the police is also a call to invest in the resources,
institutions, and practices — new, more effective practices — that
actually rebuild his- torically neglected communities and people. To
reallocate the exorbi- tant amount of money and resources given to
law enforcement to the communities that have been directly im-
pacted by racist and violent policing for generations. Right now, it is
not up to politicians to dic- tate to the masses of people fed up with
this country’s inability to ad- dress its racist history with any lasting
or meaningful intent. Their role — if any — is to listen and act in
defense of Black lives.
Black, Indigenous solidarity rally met with violent police force
in Chicago by Shabbir Manjee July 19 2020

On July 17, protesters gathered at Buckingham Fountain in Chicago
to denounce colonialism and call for the abolishment of the police
and the redistribution of funds back to the people of Chicago. The
rally, which drew more than 1,500 people, was organized by Chi-Na-
tions Youth Council, Black Lives Matter Chicago, BYP1000 and several
other organizations.

The event kicked off peacefully with Indigenous drumming and
chants of solidarity with the Indigenous cause. Speakers called for
the abolition and defunding of the police, with chants from the now
famous line-turned-song “You about to lose your job!” A popular
sign and slogan of the event could be seen throughout the crowd:
“#DecolonizeZhigaagoong” [Decolonize Chicago]. A Chicago hip-hop
artist performed and was met with loud cheers and dancing from the
crowd.

Soon after, some 1,000 people, directed by some of the speakers,
began to march down Columbus Drive toward the statue of Christo-
pher Columbus. As they marched they chanted, “I am on stolen land,
built by stolen people!”

Chicago police surrounded the statue and would not let the protest-
ers through. They began swinging nightsticks and batons.

While local media focused on the protesters throwing bottles and
firecrackers, it was clear that the police instigated the violence. “CPD
can’t be satisfied with a peaceful resolution,” said Drake Stewart of
the Party for Socialism and Liberation of Chicago.

Police also stole the protesters bicycles and used them against the
crowd. “Us throwing bikes at cops never happened, in fact cops
snatched our bikes and threw them at us, while clearing us out. They
took the bikes and stole them, yes stole. Because that’s what they
are, they are leeches and thieves,” protester Anna Burgos told Liber-
ation News.

Some protesters ensnared the statue with ropes in order to tear it
down. The police, clad in riot gear, pepper sprayed the section of the
crowd facing Columbus Drive, breaking through a human barricade.
Stewart and Burgos were both pepper sprayed. “The entire surface
of my body was irritated to the point of feeling boiled alive. For two
hours I wanted to rip my skin off or take an ice bath,” said Stewart.
Swinging nightsticks, the police detained and arrested at least 12
people; many protesters were injured. The crowd retreated and re-
turned to Buckingham Fountain to rally in solidarity. “It was beautiful
to see how many people came together in solidarity for BIPOC ...
truly beautiful to see the unity and community protecting each oth-
er, aiding each other, offering support and help,” said Burgos. Funds
were quickly set up to help those injured or whose bicycles were
taken by police.
“It only further proves we do not need a police state. We need each
other. Our community. Our solidarity, unconditionally. Our commu-
nities would thrive if CPD was defunded and that budget went to
schools, mental health programs, etc.,” Burgos said.
Statues of Columbus have long been a point of controversy in Chica-
go, although Mayor Lori Lightfoot has opposed taking them down.
“Chicagoans have been calling for the removal of Columbus statues
for years. The responsible thing to do would have been to mothball
the statue, as the city has done with many statues over they years,”
said Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa on Twitter. “Black and Indige-
nous Chicagoans and people from all across the city came together
to do what our so-called progressive mayor refused and failed to do.
They were met with violence and abuse. It’s shameful and disgust-
ing.” After the rally, a fence was placed around the statue by the
Chicago Police Department.

18-Year-Old Activist Had Teeth Knocked Out By Police
At Columbus Statue Protest, Officials Say by Block Club

Chicago Staff

An 18-year-old activist who had just spoken to a crowd protesting
at the Christopher Columbus statue in Grant Park had several front
teeth knocked out by a Chicago Police officer Friday evening, ac-
cording to video and multiple elected officials.
An outraged Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th) said Miracle Boyd, 18, of the
group GoodKids MadCity was assaulted by a police officer during the
tense Friday night protest where police pepper-sprayed protesters
trying to tear down a towering, nearly 90-year-old statue of Colum-
bus.
Taylor, who knows Boyd, said the rising young activist was injured
by police. Boyd was filming the encounter, in which she argued with
officers away from the Columbus statue. At the end of her record-
ing, her phone appears to be knocked away. A second video, posted
to Twitter from someone filming across the street, shows an officer
wearing shorts and a bike helmet swinging his left hand at her. She
flees after he swings. Ald. Taylor said watching video of the attack
horrified her. Taylor’s daughter is good friends with Boyd.
“I’m going to tell you right now, if this was my kid — and Miracle
is one of mine — I would burn this city to the ground,” Taylor said.
“You beat people up over a statue? You rough them up over a stat-
ue?
“They’re so busy protecting white supremacy, they’re so busy pro-
tecting a Christopher Columbus statue that they beat her.”
On Sunday, Boyd told Block Club she had been trying to assist a
protester she saw being arrested when two officers approached her,
one with dark gray facial hair and sunglasses. “He walked up to me
and smacked me,” Boyd said Sunday. “I don’t know if the phone hit
me in the mouth, I don’t know if his hand hit me in the mouth.

“But the way that I was recording, I think that he tried to smack the
phone in my hand and he hit me at the same time, and the phone
hit me in the mouth, and it knocked my tooth out and I was bleed-
ing.” GoodKids MadCity tweeted in the aftermath, showing Boyd
suffered multiple injuries to her face and chipped teeth. They later
tweeted the video footage they said showed a police officer beat-
ing Boyd in the face. Essence Gatheright, a 16-year-old member of
Chicago Freedom School's youth leadership board who was at the
protest, said Boyd spoke at the rally earlier that night.

Gatheright helped get Boyd get medical attention at the Freedom
School after she was hit.

“Her teeth came out, it was really bad,” Gatheright said. “She was
bleeding, she kept crying and sobbing. It was a really messed up
situation. ... We were able to walk her and others to the school and
provide her with support and make sure she got home safely.”

Ald. Taylor said Boyd is “a good kid, a CPS graduate” who has
helped raise money for the most vulnerable in her community. “I
don’t care if you become the president, the mayor, the garbage man
— you are not exempt from this country and what its racist ass will
do to you,” Taylor said.

Through tears, Taylor said she was tired. “How many more times
are we going to go through this?”

State Sen. Robert Peters posted the photo of Boyd’s injuries, say-
ing he had just offered her an internship last week because she is
“fighting gun violence everyday.”

“She is just over 5 ft, 100 pounds. Tonight a police officer beat her.
Knocked out her teeth,” Peters tweeted. “I’m sad, angry, and dis-
gusted.”

Kofi Ademola, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Chicago, also
tweeted about the case Friday, saying “Don’t let the Mayor or city
Council sleep until we get the justice we demand!”

Boyd is a recent graduate of Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy in
Ashburn. Last weekend, she helped lead a protest through Washing-
ton Park and Woodlawn in memory of friends lost to violence. She
said more policing is not the answer and demanded that Mayor Lori
Lightfoot divest from the Chicago Police Department and direct the
money to communities instead.

“We're the people of the community. I don’t see you [Mayor Light-
foot] out here organizing people,” Boyd said. “... We are the ones in
our community that have to deal with the trauma.” She was recently
featured in a Block Club Chicago story about the Washington Park
protest. She also co-wrote a story about activism in Injustice Watch.
Friday evening's protest ended in in clashes between police and
demonstrators, some of whom attempted to pull down the statute of
Christopher Columbus in the southern edge of the park. Police eventually
converged on the area, using pepper spray to push back protesters. Video
tweeted from reporters and demonstrators shows multiple physical con-
frontation. In a statement, the Chicago Police News Affairs office said it
was not aware of the Boyd incident.

“The Chicago Police Department strives to treat all individuals our officers
encounter with respect,” according to the statement. “We do not tolerate
misconduct of any kind and if any wrongdoing is discovered, officers will be
held accountable. Anyone who feels they have been mistreated by a CPD
officer is encouraged to call 311 and file a complaint with COPA, who will
investigate allegations of misconduct.”

During the protest last week in Washington Park, Boyd and other activists
detailed proposals about reducing violence in their communities, calling on
the city to reallocate 2 percent of the Chicago police budget to services like
robust mental health, schools and grocery stores.

That money would help support violence interrupters and other residents
doing ground-level work to keep communities safe through direct action
with gang members. Peace treaties, accountability, ttauma-healing and a
restorative justice process are all part of the plan, Boyd said.

 
The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis
Account and Analysis

The following analysis is motivated by @ discussion that took place in front of the Third’Precinct as fires billowed from its win-
dows on Day Three of the George Floyd Rebellion in Minneapolis. We joined a group of people whose fire-lt faces beamed in
with joy and awe from across the street. People of various ethnicities sat side by side talking about the tactical value of lasers,
the “share everything” ethos, interracial unity in fighting the police, and the trap of “innocence.” There were no disagreements;
we all saw the same things that helped us win. Thousands of people shared the experience of these batties. We hope that
they will carry the memory of how to fight. But the time of combat and the celebration of victory is incommensurable with the
habits, spaces, and attachments of everyday life and its reproduction. Its frightening how distant the event already feels from
us. Our purpose here is to preserve the strategy that proved victorious against the Minneapolis Third Precinct.

(Our analysis focuses on the tactics and composition of the crowd that besieged the Third Precinct on Day Two of the uprising.
The siege lasted roughly from 4 pm well into the early hours of the morning of May 28. We believe that the tactical retreat of
the police from the Third Precinct on Day Three was won by the siege of Day Two, which exhausted the Precincts personnel
and supplies. We were not present for the fighting that preceded the retreat on Day Three, as we showed up just as the police
were leaving. We were across the city in an area where youth were fighting the cops in tit-for-tat battles while trying to loot a
strip mall—hence our focus on Day Two here.

Context

The last popular revolt against the Minneapolis Police Department took place in re-
sponse to the police murder of Jamar Clark on November 15, 2015. It spurred two weeks
of unrest that lasted until December 2. Crowds repeatedly engaged the police in ballistic
confrontations; however, the response to the shooting coalesced around an occupation
of the nearby Fourth Precinct. Organizations like the NAACP and the newly formed
Black Lives Matter asserted their control over the crowds that gathered; they were often
at odds with young unaffiliated rebels who preferred to fight the police directly. Much of
our analysis below focuses on how young Black and Brown rebels from poor and work-
ing-class neighborhoods seized the opportunity to reverse this relationship. We argue
that this was a necessary condition for the uprising.

George Floyd was murdered by the police at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue between
8\20 and 8\32 pm on Monday, May 25. Demonstrations against the killing began the next
day at the site of his murder, where a vigil took place. Some attendees began a march to
the Third Precinct at Lake Street and 26th, where rebels attacked police vehicles in the
parking lot.

These two locations became consistent gathering points. Many community groups, orga-
nizations, liberals, progressives, and leftists assembled at the vigil site, while those who
wanted to fight generally gathered near the Precinct. This put over two miles between
two very different crowds, a spatial division that was reflected in other areas of the city as
well. Looters clashed with police in scattered commercial zones outside of the sphere of
influence of the organizations while many of the leftist marches excluded fighting ele-
ments with the familiar tactic of peace policing in the name of identity-based risk aver-
sion.

The “Subject” of The George Floyd Uprising

The subject of our analysis is not a race, a class, an organization, or even a movement,
but a crowd. We focus on a crowd for three reasons. First, with the exception of the
street medics, the power and success of those who fought the Third Precinct did not
depend on their experience in “organizing” or in organizations. Rather, it resulted from
unaffiliated individuals and groups courageously stepping into roles that complemented
each other and seizing opportunities as they arose.

While the initial gathering was occasioned by a rally hosted by a Black-led organization,
all of the actions that materially defeated the Third Precinct were undertaken after the
rally had ended, carried out by people who were not affiliated with it. There was practical-
ly no one there from the usual gamut of self-appointed community and religious leaders,
which meant that the crowd was able to transform the situation freely. Organizations rely
on stability and predictability to execute strategies that require great quantities of time to
formulate. Consequently, organization leaders can be threatened by sudden changes in

 

 
the social conditions, which can make their organizations irrelevant. Organizations—
even self-proclaimed “revolutionary” organizations—have an interest in suppressing
spontaneous revolt in order to recruit from those who are discontent and enraged.
Whether it is an elected official, a religious leader, a “community organizer,” or a leftist
representative, their message to unruly crowds is always the same: wait.

The agency that took down the Third Precinct was a crowd and not an organization
because its goals, means, and internal makeup were not regulated by centralized au-
thority. This proved beneficial, as the crowd consequently had recourse to more prac-
tical options and was freer to create unforeseen internal relationships in order to adapt
to the conflict at hand. We expand on this below in the section titled “The Pattern of
Battle and ‘Composition.”

The agency in the streets on May 27 was located in a crowd because its constituents
had few stakes in the existing order that is managed by the police. Crucially, a gang
truce had been called after the first day of unrest, neutralizing territorial barriers to par-
ticipation. The crowd mostly originated from working-class and poor Black and Brown
neighborhoods. This was especially true of those who threw things at the police and
vandalized and looted stores. Those who do not identify as “owners” of the world that
oppresses them are more likely to fight and steal from it when the opportunity arises.
The crowd had no interest in justifying itself to onlookers and it was scarcely interested
in “signifying” anything to anyone outside of itself. There were no signs or speeches,
only chants that served the tactical purposes of “hyping up” (“Fuck 12!”) and interrupt-
ing police violence with strategically deployed “innocence” (“Hands up! Don't shoot!”).
Roles

We saw people playing the following roles:

Medical Support

This included street medics and medics performing triage and urgent care at a con-
verted community center two blocks away from the precinct. Under different circum-
stances, this could be performed at any nearby sympathetic commercial, religious, or
not-for profit establishment. Alternatively, a crowd or a medic group could occupy such
a space for the duration of a protest. Those who were organized as street medics did
not interfere with the tactical choices of the crowd. Instead, they consistently treated
anyone who needed their help.

Scanner Monitors and Telegram App Channel Operators

This is common practice in many US cities by now, but police scanner monitors with
an ear for strategically important information played a critical role in setting up informa-
tion flows from the police to the crowd. It is almost certain that on the whole, much of
the crowd was not practicing the greatest security to access the Telegram channel. We
advise rebels to set up the Telegram app on burner phones in order to stay informed
while preventing police stingrays (false cell phone towers) from gleaning their personal
information.

Peaceful Protestors

The non-violent tactics of peaceful protesters served two familiar aims and one unusu-
al one:

They created a spectacle of legitimacy, which was intensified as police violence esca-
lated.

They created a front line that blocked police attempts to advance when they deployed
outside of the Precinct.

In addition, in an unexpected turn of affairs, the peaceful protestors shielded those
who employed projectiles.

Whenever the police threatened tear gas or rubber bullets, non-violent protesters lined

 

 
up at the front with their hands up in the air, chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot!” Some-
times they kneeled, but typically only during relative lulls in the action. When the cops
deployed outside the Precincts, their police lines frequently found themselves facing a
line of “non-violent” protestors. This had the effect of temporarily stabilizing the space
of conflict and gave other crowd members a stationary target. While some peaceful
protestors angrily commanded people to stop throwing things, they were few and grew
quiet as the day wore on. This was most likely because the police were targeting people
who threw things with rubber bullets early on in the conflict, which enraged the crowd.
It's worth noting that the reverse has often been the case—we are used to seeing more
confrontational tactics used to shield those practicing non-violence (e.g., at Standing
Rock and Charlottesville). The reversal of this relationship in Minneapolis afforded great-
er autonomy to those employing confrontational tactics.

Ballistics Squads

Ballistics squads threw water bottles, rocks, and a few Molotov cocktails at police, and
shot fireworks. Those using ballistics didn't always work in groups, but doing so protect-
ed them from being targeted by non-violent protestors who wanted to dictate the tactics
of the crowd. The ballistics squads served three aims:

They drew police violence away from the peaceful elements of the crowd during mo-
ments of escalation.

They patiently depleted the police crowd control munitions.

They threatened the physical safety of the police, making it more costly for them to
advance.

The first day of the uprising, there were attacks on multiple parked police SUVs at the
Third Precinct. This sensibility resumed quickly on Day Two, beginning with the throw-
ing of water bottles at police officers positioned on the roof of the Third Precinct and
alongside the building. After the police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, the
ballistics squads also began to employ rocks. Elements within the crowd dismantled bus
bench embankments made of stone and smashed them up to supply additional projec-
tiles. Nightfall saw the use of fireworks by a few people, which quickly generalized in
Days Three and Four. “Boogaloos” (Second Amendment accelerationists) had already
briefly employed fireworks on Day One, but from what we saw they mostly sat it out on
the sidelines thereafter. Finally, it is worth noting that the Minneapolis police used “green
tips,” rubber bullets with exploding green ink tips to mark lawbreakers for later arrest.
Once it became clear that the police department had limited capacity to make good on
its threat and, moreover, that the crowd could win, those who had been marked had
every incentive to fight like hell to defy the police.

Laser Pointers

In the grammar of the Hong Kong movement, those who operate laser pointers are re-
ferred to as “light mages.” As was the case in Hong Kong, Chile, and elsewhere in 2019,
some people came prepared with laser pointers to attack the optical capacity of the po-
lice. Laser pointers involve a special risk/reward ratio, as it is very easy to track people
using laser pointers, even when they are operating within a dense and active crowd at
night. Laser pointer users are particularly vulnerable if they attempt to target individual
police officers or (especially) police helicopters while operating in small crowds; this is
still the case even if the entire neighborhood is undergoing mass looting (the daytime
use of high-powered lasers with scopes remains untested, to our knowledge). The
upside of laser pointers is immense: they momentarily compromise the eyesight of the
police on the ground and they can disable police surveillance drones by interfering with
their infrared sensors and obstacle-detection cameras. In the latter case, a persistently
lasered drone may descend to the earth where the crowd can destroy it. This occurred

 

  
repeatedly on Days Two and Three. If a crowd is particularly dense and visually difficult
to discern, lasers can be used to chase away police helicopters. This was successfully
demonstrated on Day Three following the retreat of the police from the Third Precinct, as
well as on Day Four in the vicinity of the Fifth Precinct battle.

Barricaders

Barricaders built barricades out of nearby materials, including an impressive barricade
that blocked the police on 26th Avenue just north of Lake Street. In the latter case,

the barricade was assembled out of a train of shopping carts and a cart- return station
pulled from a nearby parking lot, dumpsters, police barricades, and plywood and fenc-
ing materials from a condominium construction site. At the Third Precinct, the barricade
provided useful cover for laser pointer attacks and rock- throwers, while also serving as
a natural gathering point for the crowd to regroup. At the Fifth Precinct, when the police
pressed on foot toward the crowd, dozens of individuals filled the street with a multi-
rowed barricade. On the one hand, this had the advantage of preventing the police from
advancing further and making arrests, while allowing the crowd to regroup out of reach
of the rubber bullets. However, it quickly became clear that the barricades were discour-
aging the crowd from retaking the street, and it had to be partially dismantled in order to
facilitate a second press toward the police lines. It can be difficult to coordinate defense
and attack within a single gesture.

Sound Systems

Car sound systems and engines provided a sonic environment that enlivened the crowd.
The anthem of Days Two and Three was Lil’ Boosie’s “Fuck The Police.” Yet one inno-
vation we had never seen before was the use of car engines to add to the soundscape
and “rev up” the crowd. This began with a pick-up truck with a modified exhaust system,
which was parked behind the crowd facing away from it. When tensions ran high with
the police and it appeared that the conflict would resume, the driver would red line his
engine and make it roar thunderously over the crowd. Other similarly modified cars
joined in, as well as a few motorcyclists.

Looters

Looting served three critical aims. First, it liberated supplies to heal and nourish the
crowd. On the first day, rebels attempted to seize the liquor store directly across from
the Third Precinct. Their success was brief, as the cops managed to re-secure it. Early
in the standoff on Day Two, a handful of people signaled their determination by climbing
on top of the store to mock the police from the roof. The crowd cheered at this humilia-
tion, which implicitly set the objective for the rest of the day: to demonstrate the power-
lessness of the police, demoralize them, and exhaust their capacities.

An hour or so later, looting began at the liquor store and at an Aldi a block away. While
a majority of those present participated in the looting, it was clear that some took it
upon themselves to be strategic about it. Looters at the Aldi liberated immense quanti-
ties of bottled water, sports drinks, milk, protein bars, and other snacks and assembled
huge quantities of these items on street corners throughout the vicinity. In addition to
the liquor store and the Aldi, the Third Precinct was conveniently situated adjacent to a
Target, a Cub Foods, a shoe store, a dollar store, an Autozone, a Wendy's, and various
other businesses. Once the looting began, it immediately became a part of the logistics
of the crowd's siege on the Precinct.

Second, looting boosted the crowd’s morale by creating solidarity and joy through a
shared act of collective transgression. The act of gift giving and the spirit of generosity
was made accessible to all, providing a positive counterpoint to the head-to-head con-
flicts with the police.

Third, and most importantly, looting contributed to keeping the situation ungovernable.
As looting spread throughout the city, police forces everywhere were spread thin. Their

  

 

  
attempts to secure key targets only gave looters free rein over other areas in the city.
Like a fist squeezing water, the police found themselves frustrated by an opponent that
expanded exponentially.

Fires

The decision to burn looted businesses can be seen as tactically intelligent. It contrib-
uted to depleting police resources, since the firefighters forced to continually extinguish
‘structure fires all over town required heavy police escorts. This severely impacted their
ability to intervene in situations of ongoing looting, the vast majority of which they never
responded to (the malls and the Super Target store on University Ave being excep-
tions). This has played out differently in other cities, where police opted not to escort
firefighters. Perhaps this explains why demonstrators fired in the air around firefighting
vehicles during the Watts rebellion.

In the case of the Third Precinct, the burning of the Autozone had two immediate con-
sequences: first, it forced the police to move out into the street and establish a perim-
eter around the building for firefighters. While this diminished the clash at the site of
the precinct, it also pushed the crowd down Lake Street, which subsequently induced
widespread looting and contributed to the diffusion of the riot across the whole neigh-
borhood. By interrupting the magnetic force of the Precinct, the police response to the
fire indirectly contributed to expanding the riot across the city.

The Pattern of the Battle and “Composition”

We call the battles of the second and third days at the Precinct a siege because the
police were defeated by attrition. The pattern of the battle was characterized by steady
intensification punctuated by qualitative leaps due to the violence of the police and the
spread of the conflict into looting and attacks on corporate-owned buildings. The com-
bination of the roles listed above helped to create a situation that was unpoliceable, yet
which the police were stubbornly determined to contain. The repression required for
every containment effort intensified the revolt and pushed it further out into the sur-
rounding area. By Day Three, all of the corporate infrastructure surrounding the Third
Precinct had been destroyed and the police had nothing but a “kingdom of ashes” to
show for their efforts. Only their Precinct remained, a lonely target with depleted sup-
plies. The rebels who showed up on Day Three found an enemy teetering on the brink.
All it needed was a final push.

Day Two of the uprising began with a rally: attendees were on the streets, while the
police were stationed on top of their building with an arsenal of crowd control weapon-
ry. The pattern of struggle began during the rally, when the crowd tried to climb over
the fences that protected the Precinct in order to vandalize it. The police fired rubber
bullets in response as rally speakers called for calm. After some time passed and more
speeches were made, people tried again. When the volley of rubber bullets came, the
crowd responded with rocks and water bottles. This set off a dynamic of escalation that
accelerated quickly once the rally ended. Some called for non-violence and sought to
interfere with those who were throwing things, but most people didn’t bother arguing
with them. They were largely ignored or else the reply was always the same: “That
non-violence shit don’t work!” In fact, neither side of this argument was exactly cor-
ret is the course of the battle was to demonstrate, both sides needed each other to
accomplish the historic feat of reducing the Third Precinct to ashes.

It's important to note that the dynamic we saw on Day Two did not involve using
non-violence and waiting for repression to escalate the situation. Instead, a number of
individuals stuck their necks out very far to invite police violence and escalation. Once
the crowd and the police were locked into an escalating pattern of conflict, the objective
of the police was to expand their territorial control radiating outward from the Precinct.
When the police decided to advance, they began by throwing concussion grenades at

 

 

  
the crowd as a whole and firing rubber bullets at those throwing projectiles, setting up
barricades, and firing tear gas.

The intelligence of the crowd proved itself as participants quickly learned five lessons in
the course of this struggle.

First, it is important to remain calm in the face of concussion grenades, as they are not
physically harmful if you are more than five feet away from them. This lesson extends to
a more general insight about crisis governance: don’t panic, as the police will always use
panic against us. One must react quickly while staying as calm as possible.

Second, the practice of flushing tear-gassed eyes spread rapidly from street medics
throughout the rest of the crowd. Employing stores of looted bottled water, many peo-
ple in the crowd were able to learn and quickly execute eye-flushing. People throwing
rocks one minute could be seen treating the eyes of others in the next. This basic medic
knowledge helped to build the crowd's confidence, allowing them to resist the temptation
to panic and stampede, so that they could return to the space of engagement.

Third, perhaps the crowd’s most important tactical discovery was that when one is forced
to retreat from tear gas, one must refill the space one has abandoned as quickly as pos-
sible. Each time the crowd at the Third Precinct returned, it came back angrier and more
determined either to stop the police advance or to make them pay as dearly as possible
for every step they took.

Fourth, borrowing from the language of Hong Kong, we saw the crowd practice the
maxim “Be water.” Not only did the crowd quickly flow back into spaces from which they
had to retreat, but when forced outward, the crowd didn’t behave the way that the cops
did by fixating on territorial control. When they could, the crowd flowed back into the
spaces from which they had been forced to retreat due to tear gas. But when necessary,
the crowd flowed away from police advances like a torrential destructive force. Each
police advance resulted in more businesses being smashed, looted, and burned. This
meant that the police were losers regardless of whether they chose to remain besieged
or push back the crowd. Finally, the fall of the Third Precinct demonstrates the power of
ungovernability as a strategic aim and means of crowd activity. The more that a crowd
can do, the harder it will be to police. Crowds can maximize their agency by increasing
the number of roles that people can play and by maximizing the complementary relation-
ships between them.

Non-violence practitioners can use their legitimacy to temporarily conceal or shield bal-
listics squads. Ballistics squads can draw police fire away from those practicing non-vi-
olence. Looters can help feed and heal the crowd while simultaneously disorienting the
police. In turn, those going head to head with the police can generate opportunities for
looting. Light mages can provide ballistics crews with temporary opacity by blinding the
police and disabling surveillance drones and cameras. Non-violence practitioners can
buy time for barricaders, whose works can later alleviate the need for non-violence to
secure the front line.

Here we see that an internally diverse and complex crowd is more powerful than a
crowd that is homogenous. We use the term composition to name this phenomenon of
maximizing complementary practical diversity. It is distinct from organization because
the roles are elective, individuals can shift between them as needed or desired, and
there are no leaders to assign or coordinate them. Crowds that form and fight through
composition are more effective against the police not only because they tend to be more
difficult to control, but also because the intelligence that animates them responds to and
evolves alongside the really existing situation on the ground, rather than according to
preexisting conceptions of what a battle “ought” to look like. Not only are “compositional”
crowds more likely to engage the police in battles of attrition, but they are more likely to
have the fluidity that is necessary to win.

As a final remark on this, we may contrast composition with the idea of “diversity of
tactics” used by the alter-globalization movement. “Diversity of tactics” was the idea
that different groups at an action should use different tactical means in different times
or spaces in order to work toward a shared goal. In other words, “You do you and I'll do
me,” but without any regard for how what I'm doing complements what you're doing and
vice-versa. Diversity of tactics is activist code for “tolerance.” The crowd that formed on
May 27 against the Third Precinct did not “practice the diversity of tactics,” but came
together by connecting different tactics and roles to each other in a shared space-time
that enabled participants to deploy each tactic as the situation required.

The Ambiguity of Violence and Non- Violence on the Front Lines

We are used to seeing more confrontational tactics used to shield those practicing
non-violence, as in Standing Rock and Charlottesville or in the figure of the “front- liner”
in Hong Kong. However, the reversal of this relationship divided the functions of the
“militant front-liner” (& la Hong Kong) across two separate roles: shielding the crowd and
counter-offense. This never rose to the level of an explicit strategy in the streets; there
were no calls to “shield the throwers.” In the US context, where non- violence and its at-
tendant innocence narratives are deeply entrenched in struggles against state racism, it
is unclear if this strategy could function explicitly without ballistics crews first taking risks
to invite bloodshed upon themselves. In other words, it appears likely that the joining of
ballistics tactics and non-violence in Minneapolis was made possible by a tacitly shared
perception of the importance of self-sacrifice in confronting the state that forced all sides
to push through their fear.

Yet this shared perception of risk only goes so far. While peaceful protesters proba-

bly viewed each other's gestures as moral symbols against police violence, ballistics
squads undoubtedly viewed those gestures differently, namely, as shields, or as ma-
terially strategic opportunities. Here again, we may highlight the power of the way that
composition plays out in real situations, by pointing out how it allows the possibility that
totally different understandings of the same tactic can coexist side by side. We combine
without becoming the same, we move together without understanding one another, and
yet it works.

There are potential limits to dividing front-liner functions across these roles. First, it
doesn’t challenge the valorization of suffering in the politics of non-violence. Second, it
leaves the value of ballistic confrontation ambiguous by preventing it from coalescing in
a stable role at the front of the crowd. It is undeniable that the Third Precinct would not
have been taken without ballistic tactics. However, because the front line was identified
with non-violence, the spatial and symbolic importance of ballistics was implicitly sec-
ondary. This leaves us to wonder whether this has made it easier for counter-insurgency
to take root in the movement through “community policing” and its corollary, the self-po-
licing of demonstrations and movements within the bounds of non-violence. Fact-Check-
ing: A Critical Necessity for the Movement

We believe that the biggest danger facing the current movement was already present at
the Battle of the Third Precinct—namely, the danger of rumors and paranoia. We main-
tain that the practice of “fact checking” is crucial for the current movement to minimize
confusion about the terrain and internal distrust about its own composition.

We heard a litany of rumors throughout Day Two. We were told repeatedly that riot
police reinforcements were on their way to kettle us. We were warned by fleeing crowd
members that the National Guard was “twenty minutes away.” A white lady pulled up
alongside us in her van and screamed “THE GAS LINES IN THE BURNING AUTO-
ZONE ARE GONNA BLOWWW!!!" All of these rumors proved to be false. As expres-

 
sions of panicked anxiety, they always produced the same effect: to make the crowd
second-guess their power. It was almost as if certain members of the crowd experi-
enced a form of vertigo in the face of the power that they nonetheless helped to forge.
It is necessary to interrupt the rumors by asking questions of those repeating them.
There are simple questions that we can ask to halt the spread of fear and rumors that
have the effect of weakening the crowd. “How do you know this?” “Who told you this?”
“What is the source of your information?” “Is this a confirmed fact?” “The evidence
seems inconclusive; what assumptions are you using to make a judgment?”

Along with rumors, there is also the problem of attributing disproportionate importance
to certain features of the conflict. Going into Day Two, one of the dominant storylines
was the threat of “Boogaloo boys,” who had showed up the previous day. This sur-
prised us because we didn't encounter them on Day One. We saw half a dozen of
them on Day Two, but they had relegated themselves to the sidelines of an event that
outstripped them. Despite their proclaimed sympathy with George Floyd, a couple of
them later stood guard in front of a business to defend it from looters. This demon-
strated not only the limit of their claimed solidarity, but also of their strategic sensibility.
Finally, we awoke on Day Three to so-called reports that either police provocateurs or
outside agitators were responsible for the previous day's destruction. Target, Cub
Foods, Autozone, Wendy's, and a half-constructued condominium high rise had al
gone up in flames by the end of the night. We cannot discount the possibility that any
number of hostile forces sought to smear the crowd by escalating the destruction of
property. If that is true, however, it cannot be denied that their plan backfired spectac-
ularly.

In general, the crowd looked upon these sublime fires with awe and approval. Even
on the second night, when the condominium development became fully engulfed, the
crowd sat across from it on 26th Avenue and rested as if gathered around a bonfire.
Each structure fire contributed to the material abolition of the existing state of things
and the reduction to ash became the crowd's seal of victory. Instead of believing the
rumors about provocateurs or agitators, we find it more plausible that people who
have been oppressed for centuries, who are poor, and who are staring down the barrel
of a Second Great Depression would rather set the world on fire than suffer the sight
of its order. We interpret the structure fires as signifying that the crowd knew that the
structures of the police, white supremacy, and class are based in material forces and
buildings.

For this reason, we maintain that we should assess the threat posed by possible
provocateurs, infiltrators, and agitators on the basis of whether their actions directly
enhance or diminish the power of the crowd. We have learned that dozens of structure
fires are not enough to diminish “public support” for the movement— though no one
could have imagined this beforehand. However, those who filmed crowd members de-
stroying property or breaking the law—regardless of whether they intended to inform
law enforcement agencies—posed a material threat to the crowd, because in addition
to bolstering confusion and fear, they empowered the state with access to information.
Postscript: Visions of the Commune

Ever since Guy Debord's 1965 text “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-
Commodity Economy,” there has been a rich tradition of memorializing the emergence
of communal social life in riots. Riots abolish capitalist social relations, which allows
for new relations between people and the things that make up their world. Here is our
evidence.

When the liquor store was opened, dozens came out with cases of beer, which were
set on the ground with swagger for everyone to share. The crowd's beer of choice was
Corona.

We saw a man walk calmly out of the store with both arms full of whiskey. He gave
one to each person he passed as he walked off to rejoin the fight. Some of the emp-
tied liquor bottles on the street were later thrown at the police.

With buildings aflame all around us, a man walked by and said to no one in particular,
“That tobacco shop used to have a great deal on loosies... oh well. Fuck ‘em.”

We saw a woman walking a grocery cart full of Pampers and steaks back to her
house. A group that was taking a snack and water break on the corner clapped in
applause as she rolled by.

After a group opened the Autozone, people sat inside smoking cigarettes as they
watched the battle between cops and rebels from behind the front window. One could
see them pointing back and forth between the police and elements in the crowd as
they spoke and nodding in response to each other. Were they seeing the same things
we were seeing?

We shopped for shoes in the ransacked storeroom of a looted Foot Locker. The floor
was covered wall to wall with half-destroyed shoeboxes, tissue paper, and shoes.
People called out for sizes and types as they rummaged. We spent fifteen minutes just
to find a matching pair until we heard the din of battle and dipped.

On Day Three, the floors of the grocery stores that had been partially bumed out

were covered in inches of sprinkler water and a foul mix of food that had been thrown
from the shelves. Still, people in rain boots could be found inside combing over the
remaining goods like they were shopping for deals. Gleaners helped each other step
over dangerous objects and, again, shared their loot outside.

As the police made their retreat, a young Somali woman dressed in traditional garb
celebrated by digging up a landscaping brick and unceremoniously heaving it through
a bus stop shelter window. Her friends—also traditionally dressed—raised their fists
and danced.

Amasked shirtless man skipped past the burning Precinct and pumped his fists,
shouting, “COVID IS OVER!” while twenty feet away, some teenage girls took a group
selfie. Instead of saying “Cheese!” they said “Death to the pigs!” Lasers flashed across
the smoke-filled sky at a police helicopter overhead.

We passed a liquor store that was being looted as we walked away from the best party
on Earth. A mother and her two young teenagers rolled up in their car and asked if
there was any good booze left. “Hell yea! Get some!” The daughter grinned and said,
“Come on! I'll help you Mommy!” They donned their COVID masks and marched off.
Aday later, before the assault on the Fifth Precinct, there was mass looting in the
Midtown neighborhood. A young kid who couldn't be more than seven or eight years
old walked up to us with a whiskey bottle sporting a rag coming out the top. “Y’all got
a light?” We laughed and asked, “What do you wanna hit?” He pointed to a friendly
grocery store and we asked if he could find “an enemy target.” He immediately turned
to the US Bank across the street.

  
May 28: The 3rd Precicnt during the day. It was
set alight that night

 
May 28: A looted pawn shop east of the 3rd precicnt on Lake street about to catch fire. The story
spread the the previous night the owener had shot and killed some

May 28: The back of the same pawn shop on fire

 
Unheard Voices: Are Police Participating In Sex Tra9cking In
Milwaukee?
by Netscape Negro Jun 24

T he media world is constantly on 1re with scandalous tales of peo-
ple like the late billionaire Inancier sex criminal Je9rey

Epstein, and more recently, the widespread protests in the wake of
the murder of George Floyd have garnered nonstop attention. How-
ever, at the intersection of sexual violence near the heart of power,
and police reform/abolition, is a little big story that has only been
covered by local news as of now. If you turn on CNN I’m sure you'll
get analysis of the president’s latest tweets, instead of the horror
that broke to the surface of Milwaukee last night. For those of us
not in Milwaukee, including myself, last night came as an incredible
shock. According to sources following the case, last night, it seems
that a coalition of community members uncovered a set of homes
that were traIcking missing black children, apparently at the behest
of both the church, local police, and registered sex o9enders. This
strange story doesn’t end or begin there, and as we'll see, some-
thing truly sinister is happening, and this is only a fragment of a
possibly massive organism of cruelty.

This massive story begins with an unfortunately common incident,
a young black child went missing on Sunday. This was not the irst,
nor was this an isolated incident, as other families began to suspect
that someone was behind this. According to a tweet by someone
following the case, the parents had contacted authorities who had
stonewalled, saying that they were, “not endangered”. As a result,
no amber alert was ever issued for the now two children missing.
On Tuesday night, the mother of one of the missing girls was able to
ping the cellphone of one of the missing girls to a two story town-
house in Milwaukee. The mother, along with several others went to
the property, in addition to calling police, who ignored them for 10
hours. An attempt at entry was made, and someone from within the
house shot at the group, no injuries were reported. The shots were
heard much louder than the phone call, and police arrived at the
scene. The people within the home were taken into custody. Imme-
diately after, the report from people on the ground starts to diverge
from the police and media narrative.

After the arrests were made, a crowd began to form, and cops be-
gan to circle the original location, as well as a second location that
was deemed to be connected. Many social media posts and lives-
treams began to spring up, as well as the aforementioned posts
cited above. During this, a search party of people recovered the
two girls from the location. Police on the scene, claimed to have
not seen any children during their search, something that is Tat out
untrue. The pictures and videos that were recovered by the search
party were heartbreaking. During the search party, unknown peo-
ple were taken into custody anonymously via tarps and placed into
an unmarked van. The owner of the property was claimed to have
escaped by police, and yet people on the ground claim that he had
Ted to the van parked on the second property.

L 7 are

   

 

 

Sometime after, the protesters noticed a 1re in the second
location as well as in the van. While police claim that the pro-
testers started the 1re, people on the ground had not yet
entered the van nor the second property, of which police were
1rst on the scene to. In an attempt to salvage evidence, peo-
ple entered the home, and found several documents already
burnt near the center of the blaze. Some papers were recov-
ered, including what is allegedly (this document has not been
released) a time schedule of what times the girls were solicit-
ed out, and the name of someone who was connected to this.
That name was of the property owner, Mike Bartsch, a disaster
recovery specialist who had been working as a spiritual leader
for children at local youth camps. This person serves as a se-
nior board member of this group, and has been working with
them as far back as 2014, though he does have other ties

to local Lutheran groups. Another identity recovered was the
name of Roderick Bowie, a registered sex o9ender, who had
apparently been in repeated contact with the tralcked people,
of which their are 20 missing children suspected of having
been sent through this home, according to people familiar with
the area. One girl was found nearby in October, and police had
apparently refused to investigate further out of a lack of evi-
dence, though bloody clothes had been found in the area. The
home has been politely scrubbed by their former realtor in an
attempt to further obfuscate this tangled web, though archives
are available.

Shortly after this, riot cops came to the location and began
attacking people who were stationed outside this area. Despite
overwhelming evidence that there was a traIcking organiza-
tion, they shot rubber bullets and tear gas at the people at-
tempting to investigate. Due to the in1nite compassion of the
people there, no olcers were harmed, and i1reighters began
to put out the blaze as people drew back. Finally, nearly 72
hours after this event had started, the media began to arrive
with a helicopter to survey the area. The irst write up about
the story to appear online came from the local ABC station.
This article was only 18 sentences long and repeated nearly
verbatim what the police had said. For the 20+ Black children,
they get less than a sentence each for their stories. Their
names and families will be plastered all over local news forev-
er, and yet not a single breath was given to the people behind
this, out of respect for the little black girls whose lives will be
forever changed by this ordeal in numerous ways, I refuse to
print their names to make them part of the spectacle. As for
the Milwaukee PD, their 1rst media soundbite was that “[We]
have not conirmed that the girls were found because they
said they have not been contacted”. As for Police Chief Alfon-
so Morales, he claims that no evidence of traIcking has been
found and that the “unruly mob” will be investigated as well.
In a theater world where Black bodies murdered by police are
constantly on display, this brief peepshow into the dark un-
derbelly of this trauma cabaret shows that police are, at best
not on the side of the communities they claim to protect, and
very well may be actively serving interests directly against the
towns on their badges.
Research Determines Protests Did Not Cause Spike In
Coronavirus Cases
Tommy Beer // Forbes // July 1, 2020

Protests against systemic racism held in 300-plus U.S. cities

following the death of George Floyd did not cause a significant
increase in coronavirus infections, according to a team of
economists who have published their findings in a 60-page
paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research;
these somewhat surprising results are supported by Covid-19
testing data in many populous cities where demonstrations
were held.

Key Facts:

In the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s death, health officials
expressed great concern that protesters, potentially yelling
and shouting in very close proximity, would quickly spread
the virus, which might lead to devastating outbreaks.
However, researchers found “no evidence that urban protests
reignited Covid-19 case growth during the more than three
weeks following protest onset.”

In fact, they determined that, based on cellphone data, “cities
which had protests saw an increase in social distancing
behavior for the overall population relative to cities that did
not,” leading to “modest evidence of a small longer-run case
growth decline.”

The study’s lead author, Dhaval Dave of Bentley University,
said, “In many cities, the protests actually seemed to lead to
a net increase in social distancing, as more people who did
not protest decided to stay off the streets.”

The study used newly collected data from 315 of the largest
U.S. cities and documents that protests took place in 281 of
those cities.

The authors prereleased the paper last week, and it has not
yet been peer-reviewed.
Key Background:

The study’s conclusions are supported by Covid-19 testing
data in many of the cities that were home to prevalent protesting.
For instance, the Minneapolis Department of Health reported
that more than 15,000 people were tested at centers set up
in communities affected by the protests, and 1.7% of tests
came back positive—below the statewide average of about
3.6%. According to the Washington Post, protest attendees in
Minneapolis returned positivity rates of less than 1% and that
“officials believe the low infection rates reflect that the protests
were outside, that most people wore masks and that people
spent most of their time in motion, circulating through the
crowd.” NPR reported last week that parties—not protests—
are believed to have caused coronavirus spikes in Washington.
“We’re finding that the social events and gatherings, these
parties where people aren’t wearing masks, are our primary
source of infection,” said Erika Lautenbach, a local county
Health Department director.

Tangent:

Earlier this week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy
partly blamed increased coronavirus cases on protesters.
“When | looked at that drone view of [Los Angeles], where it was
almost a mile-long shoulder-to-shoulder of people, and they’re
expressing, they’re vocal . . . and now we’re finding that’s the
easiest way to transmit to one another, the long periods of
time next to one another,” said McCarthy, a Republican who
represents California. In the NBER paper’s abstract, the authors
write, “We conclude that predictions of broad negative public
health consequences of Black Lives Matter protests were far
too narrowly conceived.”

Critical Quote:

“When considering the results’ implications for the entire
population: public speech and public health did not trade off
against each other in this case,” the authors wrote in the NBER
Paper.
Here’s what you need ° now about defunding the police
Retta

At first, protesters demanded that a ae Mi the Minneapolis police officers responsible for
Floyd’s death be held accountable, but now, they are increasingly calling to defund the police

-- arguing that billions of dollars shouldn't go to police departments in America when public
education, housing programs and health departments are drastically underfunded. Some cities,
such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, have already pledged to defund their police departments
in the coming year, and in Minneapolis, officials have taken this movement one step further --
by pledging to disband their police department all together and create a new community-based
effort for public safety. Though “defund the police” has become a rallying cry as of late in the
aftermath of Floyd’s death and subsequent police brutality, efforts to defund and abolish policing
in America are by no means new. Many Black radical activists such as Angela Davis and Mal-
colm X were vocal abolitionists, arguing for the end of both policing and the prison industrial
complex in the US in the 60s. In 2018, abolitionist

organizers in Minneapolis were able to divest $1.1 million dollars away

from their police budget and invest in a newly formed Office of Violence Prevention, a com-
munity led organization committed to public safety without policing. While this reform was an
enormous accomplishment, this happened two years before Floyd was killed in the same city,
which is why many advocates point to the need for further defunding and disbanding of police
across the country. “Defunding is necessary because instead of using that money for things like
police trainings, we want to use that money to invest in things that have actually been shown to
improve peoples lives -- like healthcare, access to fresh foods and education systems that are re-
flective of the community's needs,’ K Agbebiyi, a social worker and abolitionist organizer based
in New York City, tells i-D. “Police training, body cameras and other reforms fail to reckon with
the fact that policing, as it was conceived and how it is used today, and how it will be used in
the future is anti-Black. No amount of reform can fix something with rotten roots.” Agbebiyi’s
argument touches on the highly contested debate in America right now: should the police be
defunded or reformed? Many politicians, including Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser

and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, have ignored their citizen’s demands for a smaller police
budget and have instead put forth a slew of police reforms such as bias training and mandatory
body cameras intended to quell police violence against Black Americans. Campaign Zero, a
police reform campaign started by activists associated with Black Lives Matter, recently unveiled
its #8CantWait campaign which proposed several police reforms including a ban on choke-
holds and firing shots at moving vehicles, and requiring comprehensive reporting of all crimes
everywhere. Notably, employees at Campaign Zero recently admitted that the campaign was
invalid, and many of the higher-ups at the organization resigned in admission that the reforms
suggested were not well researched or executed. Many have been extremely dissatisfied with re-
forms on the table across the country. Activists have taken to social media to call for immediate
defunding and disbanding of police in place of reform, and many and have pointed out how past
instances of reform have been ineffective -- in 2014, Eric Garner was killed by a police officer in
New York who held him in a chokehold, even though chokeholds were banned by the New York
Department in 1993. Others have noted that neighborhoods with less police presence
typically also have less crime, and have pointed out that crime in New York City fell significantly
when the NYPD went on strike in 2015. In light of this, many believe that defunding the police
and investing their budgets in other public goods is a more effective way of keeping commu-
nities safe. “Time and time again we have seen police reform policies like mandatory body
cameras and community oversight boards fail to keep our communities safe, even despite good
intentions,” Jessica Shotwell, abolitionist organizer in Black Youth Project 100’s DC chapter and
a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, tells i-D. “Police reform assumes that policing

 
can be ‘better, so people advocate for more funding, resources and training for the police. What
other job involves killing, harassing and terrorizing, yet gets rewarded through more funding? If
we want the police to stop killing us, then we truly have no choice but to abolish the institution
itself. A way to start is by defunding police departments and investing in community care, not
cops.” As an abolitionist, Shotwell aims to not only defund the police, but eventually abolish the
policing system in America altogether. She is not alone in this effort. In response to the #8Cant-
‘Wait campaign, several abolitionist organizers created a new campaign entitled #8ToAbolition,
which lists eight steps to disbanding and abolishing police forces across the country. The first

is to defund the police, followed by demilitarizing communities and removing police from
schools. The eventual goal of the campaign is to envision a radical new form of public safety
where police no longer exist.

“Defunding the police will look like eliminating their budgets until the police as an
institution is abolished,” Shotwell says. “We want to be very clear: defunding the police is an
abolitionist demand, but it is not our only demand. We demand investment in safe housing,
healthcare, access to food, public transportation and sustainable employment. We don't just
want to see the police department's budget slashed to zero” Many argue that defunding the po-
lice is a crucial first step in changing the way that public safety operates in America. The NYPD,
for example, has a $6 billion annual budget, but spends $2 billion on homeless services, $1.7
billion on sanitation and less than $1.3 billion on environmental protection annually. In the last
few weeks, graphics have cropped up across the internet as a brutal illustration of how overfund-
ed our police budgets are compared to spending on public goods: in Madison, WI, the annual
police budget is $86 million dollars while only $19 million is spent on public health, and in Des
Moines, Iowa, a third of the city’s budget is spent on police alone. “In my opinion, I think that
defunding the police would look like a divest/invest strategy, something my comrades in Free
Them All 4 Public Health have really been discussing a lot recently, though the strategy has of
course existed before then,” Agbebiyi says. “Cities and states would divest and take money away
from the police budget, hopefully shrinking the pool of police officers, and diverting the money
to other actually essential things like free housing, free healthcare and education budgets”

While most can agree that defunding the police in some form is necessary, given
extremely high budgets in most cities, there tends to be a disconnect among Americans about
how exactly these budgets should be cut, or what defunding really means. Because the definition
of abolition means abolishing the prison industrial complex and policing systems entirely, a lot
of abolitionists have been upset by visions of “defunding” that mainstream media have put forth
that don’t cut police budgets completely, or still allow a policing system to exist in some way.
Some people are seemingly scared to go this route or view it as a little extreme; they've taken to
social media to ask what would happen in emergencies where one might want to call the police,
for example. However, abolitionist organizers hope to set up a new form of community safety.
Visions of this differ, but many, such as the model put forth by Minneapolis abolitionist organiz~
ers at MPD150, advocate for civilian deescalation training, creating a separate dispatch for fire
or medical emergencies, and other tactics that allow people to keep themselves and their loved
ones safe in their community -- without a police force present.

In cities that have yet to slash their police budgets, there have been pivotal
developments --perhaps thanks to protesters increased demands and actions. New York recently
repealed Civil Rights Law section 50-A, which hasshielded police disciplinary records from the
public for 44 years. Though not a direct defunding or disbanding of the office, this is an action
that moves past reform and allows police to be held accountable for their actions by the public.
Though elected officials are the ones who ultimately have the power to determine a city’s budget,
the demands of their constituents play a large role in what reforms or changes are made in a
given location. For example, organizers in MPD150, Black Visions Collective and Reclaim The
Block each played a huge role in Minneapolis’ decision to disband their police department.
Black queer voices are normally at the forefront of these conversations too -- both historically
and in current discussions as well.

“Go to your city council members and mayor's budget meetings,’ Reina Sultan, a writer and
abolitionist organizer, tells i-D. “Budgets are moral documents and you can voice your priori-
ties at those meetings”

As progress towards defunding and disbanding the police continues across the country, many
look to abolitionist organizers to help imagine what a police free society could look like, and to
lead the charge. You can get involved by signing petitions, writing letters to your local officials
and by voting in local elections to ensure that people with your same priorities
are in positions of power in your city.
Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police

Because reform won’t happen.
By Mariame Kaba
Ms. Kaba is an organizer against criminalization.
Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute
police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million.
But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have
failed for nearly a century.
Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence
is to reduce contact between the public and the police.
There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not
a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from
the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway
slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s
helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have
suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.
So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck
until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police
officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.
Now two weeks of nationwide protests have led some to call for defunding
the police, while others argue that doing so would make us less safe.
The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they
do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issu-
ing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues.
We've been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they chase the bank
robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the
Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an interview with
Jacobin. But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority of police officers
make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of the month.”
We can’t simply change their job descriptions to focus on the worst of the
worst criminals. That’s not what they are set up to do.
Second, a “safe” world is not one in which the police keep black and other
marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, vio-
lence and death.
I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your
view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or simply
to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make:
Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police
officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The
idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.
History is instructive, not because it offers us a blueprint for how to act in
the present but because it can help us ask better questions for the future.
The Lexow Committee undertook the first major investigation into police
misconduct in New York City in 1894. At the time, the most common com-
plaint against the police was about “clubbing” — “the routine bludgeoning of
citizens by patrolmen armed with nightsticks or blackjacks,” as the historian
Marilynn Johnson has written.
The Wickersham Commission, convened to study the criminal justice system
and examine the problem of Prohibition enforcement, offered a scathing in-
dictment in 1931, including evidence of brutal interrogation strategies. It put

  
the blame on a lack of professionalism among the police.

After the 1967 urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission found that “police
actions were ‘final’ incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24
surveyed disorders.” Its report listed a now-familiar set of recommenda-
tions, like working to build “community support for law enforcement” and
reviewing police operations “in the ghetto, to ensure proper conduct by
police officers.”

These commissions didn’t stop the violence; they just served as a kind of
counterinsurgent function each time police violence led to protests. Calls
for similar reforms were trotted out in response to the brutal police beating
of Rodney King in 1991 and the rebellion that followed, and again after the
killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The final report of the Obama
administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing resulted

in procedural tweaks like implicit-bias training, police-community listening
sessions, slight alterations of use-of-force policies and systems to identify
potentially problematic officers early on.

But even a member of the task force, Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, “po-
licing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.” The
philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less vi-
olence. But police officers break rules all the time. Look what has happened
over the past few weeks — police officers slashing tires, shoving old men
on camera, and arresting and injuring journalists and protesters. These
officers are not worried about repercussions any more than Daniel Pantaleo,
the former New York City police officer whose chokehold led to Eric Garner’s
death; he waved to a camera filming the incident. He knew that the police
union would back him up and he was right. He stayed on the job for five
more years.

Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to re-
move Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over
nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world watching as he knelt on
George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.

Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need
to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to
reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of offi-
cers.

But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to vio-
lence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make
them obsolete.

We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward
providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this,
there would be less need for the police in the first place.

We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained
“community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs
help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people
in prison.

What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rap-
ists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who ex-
perience sexual violence never report it to anyone. Those who file police
reports are often dissatisfied with the response. Additionally, police officers
themselves commit sexual assault alarmingly often. A study in 2010 found
that sexual misconduct was the second most frequently reported form of
police misconduct. In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was
caught for sexual misconduct every five days.

When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police,
they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law
enforcement — and they shudder. As a society, we have been so indoctri-
nated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people
that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as
solutions to violence and harm.

People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vi-
sion of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on
mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if
it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for
all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests
show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety
and justice.

When the streets calm and people suggest once again that we hire more
black police officers or create more civilian review boards, I hope that we
remember all the times those efforts have failed.
Protests and Police Violence in Portland

Reports from Portland, Oregon, where protests have continued every
night since the killing of George Floyd, and police and state violence
continues to escalate.

For Portland police to provide the name of an officer at
protests, you have to give them the officer’s name first
Molly Harbarger and Celina Tebor * The Oregonian © 7/10/2020

In order for the Portland Police Bureau to tell you the names of its
officers at protests, you first have to provide them with the names of
the officers.

Back in June, then-Portland Police Chief Jami Resch first told officers
they could cover their name tags on their uniforms with tape, instead
showing their personnel number when they were working on the
street during protests in Portland. Police officials say they allowed
this move because protesters were sharing officers’ names and
addresses on social media.

The city provides officers with a personnel number, which is typically
used as an employee ID. And while officers can be identified internally
by these personnel numbers, police officials maintain they are
confidential.

Police Bureau policy says uniformed officers will visibly display their
bureau name tag and badge on their outer uniform while on duty or
at the request of a member of the public — unless doing so would
compromise the officer's safety, impair an officer's job performance or
when a supervisor has relieved officers of the requirement.

When police first started showing up at protests with “12” or “20”
written in marker on masking tape, Alan Kessler, a Portland attorney,
asked the city for the list of numbers that line up with police officers’
names. He assumed, because the numbers were usually two digits,
that they were probably randomly assigned to officers and kept ina
spreadsheet somewhere.

But instead he was given a document on June 17 that said that
police were instructed to use their employee ID numbers, write them
by hand, and place them over their names or badge numbers.

Kessler pushed back, arguing that he needed the list of city employee
ID numbers to match officers’ names with the numbers they
displayed at protests.

The city responded weeks later, saying they had given the Portland
Police Association, the police union, the opportunity to respond. The
union claimed that the numbers were exempt from disclosure.
Kessler, a lawyer who has fought the city before on First Amendment
issues, called the move “the dirtiest trick I’ve seen.”

The city gave him the option of making an argument for why certain
officers should be identified by their employee ID number: Kessler
could provide the name of the officer and why he wanted the
information.

“It’s this catch-22 where they say | cannot tell you their name unless
you give me their name,” Kessler said. “Which is silly.”

Kessler appealed to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s office
with a letter that calls the tactic a “neat trick.” He said he expects to
win his appeal, but the city has successfully slowed him down from
identifying officers who protesters claim have used excessive force
during nightly conflicts at the protests.

“We can’t figure out which people are perpetuating that violence
without asking the city first and letting them wind up their defense
machine,” Kessler said.

He also resents that the city is putting the public in the position of
having to request information considered sensitive.

Previously, Portland police officials defended their decision to allow
the obscuring of name patches because some officers reported
their families were contacted and harassed after officers’ names and
addresses were posted online.

Police officials said that the ID numbers would still allow internal
investigations into police actions.

Portland police did not respond to further questions about the policy
and whether it limits accountability.
Opinion: 50 Nights of Unrest in Portland
Charlie Warzel « The New York Times © 7/17/2020

Thursday night marked the 50th consecutive night of demonstrations
in Portland, Oregon. Since they began, the protests have grown
smaller, but clashes between law enforcement officers and protesters
have escalated — on July 12, videos circulated of a federal officer
shooting a protester in the head with a nonlethal munition, resulting
in a skull fracture. Coverage of the unrest has caught the attention

of President Trump, who vowed to “dominate” the protesters with
federal law enforcement officers.

According to recent reports from Oregon Public Broadcasting and
other outlets, federal agents dressed in fatigues have been patrolling
the city in unmarked vans, grabbing and detaining protesters, often
with no indication of whether they’ve been charged with any crime.
“This is an attack on our democracy,” Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler,
said.

The Oregon senators, Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, as well

as Senator Chuck Schumer, have requested a formal federal
investigation into the arrests. The Nation reports that the arrests have
been carried out by Customs and Border Protection, acting on the
president's “Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments,
Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence.”

To get a sense of what is unfolding in Portland and what it’s like to

be covering protests each night for two months, | spoke with Robert
Evans, a freelance journalist based in the city. Mr. Evans is a conflict
reporter who has reported from Iraq and Ukraine. He covers far-right
extremism for the investigative journalism site Bellingcat and hosts the
Behind The Bastards podcast. The conversation has been edited for
length and clarity:

What is happening in Portland right now?

What is happening in Portland right now — and | say this as
somebody who’s seen war in other countries — it’s as close up to the
line as you can get to actual war without live rounds. It’s really hard for
me to see how things go much further without people dying.

The craziest night so far was July 4, where kids stockpiled thousands
of dollars in illegal fireworks. They were in the center of downtown
where the bulk of the protests happened around the Justice Center.

It started as drunken party, more or less. At random, cops began
shooting into the crowd. Protesters coalesced around the idea of
firing commercial-grade fireworks into the Justice Center and Federal
Courthouse. You had law enforcement firing rubber bullets, foam
bullets, pepper balls and tear gas as crowds circled in around the
courthouse firing rockets into the side of the building. That went on
for a shocking length of time — there was this running three-hour
street battle. | couldn’t tell whose explosions were whose. Just a
constant series of concussions.

The president started taking Portland personally after that.

Federal law enforcement escalated after that, right? That’s
the story that is making the rounds right now — the unmarked
vans rounding up suspected protesters and arresting them.

Since the feds got involved with police it’s gotten really brutal. I’d
argue we’ve seen more police brutality in the last 50 days from
Portland Police Department than anywhere else in the country. It’s
brutal but it’s also predictable. There are rhythms to the way police
work, It’s become an orchestrated dance with both sides.

There are warnings and kicking people out of the demonstration area.
But the feds have deliberately defied the rhythms. Last Saturday, the
crowd was 100 or so. It was very chill — nothing going on beyond
the now-normal occupation of the Justice Center. And feds came

out grabbing people seemingly at random and beating people with
sticks. There was the kid who got shot in the head and his skull was
fractured. The federal law enforcement violence is unpredictable
violence.

How are people keeping up the stamina after 50 nights of this?

There’s this cycle of violence every night but also something ineffable
at the center of it. Everyone is kind of aware they’re getting some
PT.S.D. from this and it’ll hit so hard when it stops. So you can
almost delay it another night by eating the tear gas. And | do think
there’s also this growing realization that what’s happening here is
deadly serious. So there's a choice, | think. We'll either accept that
this is the country we’re living in or we'll just show up until people,
nationally, realize that this isn’t OK.

Part of it is: what else are you going to do? | live here. | don’t want

to live in a place where this happens. You can talk about journalistic
objectivity all you want but | don’t want to live in a place where federal
agents in unmarked vans abduct people.

The image of federal police in unmarked vans has captured
attention because it feels so nakedly authoritarian. Is what
we’re seeing just the purest example of American militarized
policing or is it something different?

It's something different. It’s two things. Law enforcement is extremely
lucrative and so you have a huge class of people in a lucrative
industry who feel threatened and like they need to do violence to
those who want to take the job away. The other is you have Portland,
which has put itself in opposition to this president who has made law
and order a defining issue of his re-election.

Portland is being used as a bellwether to see what this administration
can get away with. And also what works to quell protest. The police
tactics don’t work. We’re on night 50. There’s this knowledge, |
believe, in the more lucid chunks of the administration, that this
problem will get worse in the next month. August is shaping up to be
one of the hardest months in our nation’s modern history. September
may be worse. And it will have to come to a head.
Cities Remove Police from Public Schools
Information compiled from: Star Tribune, Seattle Times,

TIME, CBS News, CNN

Police removed

Minneapolis

The school board voted unanimously to terminate the
MPD’s contract to provide school resource officers.
The district will cease further negotiations with the de-
partment and Superintendent Ed Graff must come up
with a new plan for school safety by the board’s Aug.
18 meeting.

“| value people and education and life,” school board
chairwoman Kim Ellison said in an interview. “Now I’m
convinced, based on the actions of the Minneapolis
Police Department, that we don’t have the same val-
ues.”

Denver

After four hours of heated comment from the public
Thursday evening, the Denver Public Schools Board of
Education voted unanimously to order Denver Police
Department officers out of school hallways and class-
rooms.

“Last night we voted to end the contract with Denver
Police, but this was never about an individual officer,”
Anderson wrote.“It was about dismantling a system
that has held children of color down for far too long. |
know that this change comes with critics and doubts
on our ability to lead this district forward, but together
we will craft a brighter future to ensure all students are
safe in our schools and are no longer thrusted into the
school to prison pipeline.”

Seattle

School board members unanimously approved the
measure
The suspension is just one part of a broader proposal
to improve school climate for Black students, who last
year made up nearly half of students referred to police
across the district but just 14% of enrollment at Seattle
Public Schools (SPS), according to district data.

Oakland

the George Floyd Resolution to Eliminate the Oakland
Schools Police Department passed 7-0. The district will
eliminate its police department by the end of the year
and hire more social workers, psychologists or “restor-
ative justice practitioners.” In the coming months, the
district will work with students, parents, teachers and
the BOP to create a new school safety plan.

Police Remain

Chicago

By a 4-3 vote, Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s hand-picked board
voted down a motion to terminate a $33 million contract
with the Chicago Police Department to provide more than
200 school resource officers and staff sergeants at 72
high schools.

“| don’t believe that a top-down mandate makes sense

in this situation, and | share publicly that my views, my
personal views on this, continue to evolve, but | also want
to make sure that we do the right thing,” Jackson said
before the board’s vote. “If this were an easy issue, and
cut and dry, we wouldn’t be spending so much time on it
today. There are just a lot of people who have different
views about it.”

Teachers Union rallied outside the board meeting with
signs that said: “Counselors, not Cops,“ “Clean Schools,
not Cops,” and “PPE[personal protective equipment] not
CPD.”
Homeland Security making plans to deploy some 150 agents
in Chicago this week, with scope of duty unknown
by George Pratt & Jeremy Gordner July 20, 2020

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is crafting plans to de-
ploy about 150 federal agents to Chicago this week, the Chicago
Tribune has learned, a move that would come amid growing contro-
versy nationally about federal force being used in American cities.
The Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, agents are set to
assist other federal law enforcement and Chicago police in crime-
fighting efforts, according to sources familiar with the matter, though
a specific plan on what the agents will be doing had not been made
public. One city official said the city was aware of the plan but not
any specifics. The Department of Justice and DHS in Washington did
not immediately respond to requests for comment.

One Immigration and Customs Enforcement official in Chicago, who
asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak
on the matter, confirmed the deployment was expected to take
place. The official noted that the HSI agents, who are part of ICE,
would not be involved in immigration or deportation matters.

It was unclear where all the agents would be coming from, though
many were expected to be from agencies operating in the Chicago
area. Questions remained about the chain of command they would
fall under. The Chicago Police Department issued a statement Mon-
day. “The Chicago Police Department does not maintain any author-
ity over the federal government's deployment of federal law enforce-
ment agents to the City of Chicago. We regularly work alongside our
local and federal law enforcement agency partners toward the com-
mon goal of keeping Chicago residents safe,” the statement read. “If
federal agents are deployed, it is critical that they coordinate with
the Chicago Police Department and work alongside us to fight violent
crime in Chicago.”

Federal agents being used to confront street protesters in Portland,
Oregon, has raised alarm in many circles. Chicago, too, has dealt
with protests that have led to injuries in recent days. On Saturday,
the president of the Chicago police’s largest union had sent Trump a
letter asking for help from the federal government in putting a lid on
crime in the city.

out this week as we start to go in and make sure that the commu-
nities, whether it’s Chicago or Portland or Milwaukee or some place
across the heartland of the country, we need to make sure their
communities are safe.”

“I am certain you are aware of the chaos currently affecting our city
on a regular basis now,” John Catanzara, president of the Fraternal
Order of Police Lodge 7, wrote in a letter that was posted on the
FOP’s Facebook page. “I am writing to formally ask you for help
from the federal government. Mayor Lightfoot has proved to be a
complete failure who is either unwilling or unable to maintain law
and order here.” On Sunday, Black Lives Matter Chicago issued a
statement condemning Catanzara’s request, saying it “made even
more frightening” the news of federal agents rounding up protest-
ers in Portland.

“Escalating the level of surveillance and militarization of our com-
munities does not make us safer, whether it is by federal agents or
the Chicago Police Department,” the group said in the statement.
“Defunding the police and investing in education, jobs, housing,
and mental health care is what is needed to make us safe.” In addi-
tion to Portland, Homeland Security agents have already been sent
to other cities, including Washington, D.C., and Seattle.

Oregon's attorney general sued Homeland Security and the U.S.
Marshals Service on Friday, alleging in a complaint that federal
agents in Portland, which has continued to see intense unrest since
Floyd’s death on May 25, unjustifiably grabbed people from the
city’s streets.
Majority of Seattle council pledges to support Police Depart-
ment defunding plan laid out by advocates
by Daniel Beekman

A majority of Seattle City Council members now say they agree
with a high-level proposal by advocates to defund the Police De-
partment by 50% and reallocate the dollars to other community
needs.

Council members Lisa Herbold, Dan Strauss and Andrew Lewis add-
ed support Thursday to a road map set out by Decriminalize Seattle
and King County Equity Now.

They joined colleagues Tammy Morales, Kshama Sawant, Tere-

sa Mosqueda and M. Lorena Gonzalez, who previously backed the
push to reduce the Police Department’s annual budget by 50% and
promised quick action, while Mayor Jenny Durkan has asked the
council to slow down. That means seven of nine council members
are on board with the idea, though they have yet to say exactly
how they intend to make the cuts; six votes are needed to pass
budget-related legislation and to override a mayoral veto. Durkan
has not backed a 50% reduction.

Decriminalize Seattle and King County Equity Now are new coali-
tions that have emerged during the recent Black Lives Matter pro-
tests and that count a number of community organizations led by
Black people as endorsers.

In a presentation to the council's budget committee Wednesday,
they said the Police Department’s 2021 budget should be reduced
by 50% from the status quo (its budget is $409 million this year).
They also said the department’s remaining 2020 budget should be
cut by 50% this summer.

Decriminalize Seattle and King County Equity Now laid out a four
point proposal for defunding the Police Department:

Remove Seattle’s 911 dispatchers from police control

Scale up community-based solutions to public safety

Fund a community-led process to “imagine life beyond policing.”
Invest in affordable housing

The aim is “defunding the Seattle Police Department and building
a world where we trust and believe in community to provide the
safety that we need,” Decriminalize Seattle’s Jackie Vaughn said at
a news conference Thursday.

Morales, Sawant, Mosqueda and Gonzalez joined coalition repre-
sentatives and supporters for the remote news conference, pledg-
ing to advance the proposal.

Herbold told The Seattle Times she also has committed to the
demands, including cuts this summer and a 50% reduction to the
Police Department's budget. Strauss is in “100% agreement” with
the four-point proposal and believes the council must “define how
50% cuts occur,” he wrote on Twitter.

Majority of Seattle council pledges to support Police Department
defunding plan laid out by advocates | The Seattle Times 7/20/20,
5(55 PM

Councilmember Andrew Lewis later added on Twitter, “To be clear, I
am 100% in favor of the (Decriminalize Seattle) demands, including
the goal of a 50% cut of SPD’s budget.”

The council is currently considering changes to the city’s 2020 bud-
get, which has been ripped apart by the coronavirus health and
economic crisis.

Durkan last month proposed about $20 million in Police Depart-
ment cuts as part of a broader plan to close a $378 million budget
hole. Most of those cuts were identified in response to the pandem-
ic, before the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police sparked
protests across the country against violence by officers and against
institutional racism in law enforcement.

The council has the power to alter Durkan’s 2020 rebalancing pack-
age but must do so soon, in the coming weeks. This fall, the mayor
and council will hash out 2021’s budget.

In an email about the four-point proposal by Decriminalize Seattle
and King County Equity Now, Durkan spokeswoman Kelsey Nyland
said, “Our office doesn’t object to any of these ideas — they are all
undeniably critical to building a more just and equitable city. But
each ... is much more nuanced than it initially might seem, and if we
don’t factor that into our discussions ... then we'll never be able to
build actionable and lasting solutions.”

In a letter Wednesday, Senior Deputy Mayor Mike Fong warned the
council that major and immediate Police Department cuts could
require large numbers of officers to be laid off, arguing the city isn’t
ready for that scenario.

‘Significant moment’

At Thursday’s news conference, defunding advocates said communi-
ty organizations and practitioners — with adequate resources — can
protect Seattle residents better than the Police Department in many
instances.

The speakers represented the organizations Creative Justice; Trans
Women of Color Solidarity Network; Africatown Community Land
Trust; East African Community Services; Black Trans Task Force;
Greenlight Project; Wa Na Wari; and WA-BLOC.

“We are at a very significant moment,” said Nikkita Oliver, whose
nonprofit Creative Justice uses art to empower court-involved young
people and resolve their cases. “Seeing the discussion of defunding
the police become more than just a chant in the streets.”

K. Wyking Garrett, whose Africatown organization works to combat
displacement by acquiring land and developing housing in the Cen-
tral District, said militarized police responses don’t solve problems.
“Police don’t stop crime, they respond to crime,” he said. “What
really prevents crime is access to resources.”

Jaelynn Scott from the Black Trans Task Force said Black trans
community needs “should be front and center” as Seattle works on
community-based strategies to keep people safe.

Mosqueda said she will be “following the lead of Decriminalize
Seattle and King County Equity Now” in budget talks. “History has
taught us change only comes from those living on the margins ris-
ing up,” she said.

Gonzalez apologized for supporting police budget increases in past
years, saying she no longer believes the department can be wholly
reformed.
Plan advances to allow dismantling

Minneapolis Police Dept.
By Steve Karnowski and Amy Forliti - Associated Press * 6/26/2020

The Minneapolis City Council on Friday unanimously advanced a
proposal to change the city charter to allow the police department
to be dismantled, following widespread criticism of law enforcement
over the killing of George Floyd.

The 12-0 vote is just the first step in a process that faces
significant bureaucratic obstacles to make the November ballot,
where the city’s voters would have the final say. It also comes amid
a spate of recent shootings in Minnesota’s largest city that have
heightened many citizens’ concerns about talk of dismantling the
department.

The proposed amendment, which would replace the police
department with a new “Department of Community Safety and
Violence Prevention” that has yet to be fully defined, next goes toa
policy committee and to the city’s Charter Commission for a formal
review, at which point citizens and city officials can weigh in.

The Minneapolis force has come under heavy pressure since
Floyd, a Black man in handcuffs, died May 25 after a police officer
pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes. Activists
have long accused the department of being unable to change a
racist and brutal culture, and earlier this month, a majority of the
council proclaimed support for dismantling the department.

Jeremiah Ellison, a member of the council, said after the vote
that the charter is one of three major barriers to “transformative
public safety,” along with the city’s police union and the Minnesota
Legislature. The charter — which requires the city to have a police
department of a certain size — is the one thing the city council has
a say over, he said.

According to draft language posted online, the new department
“will have responsibility for public safety services prioritizing a
holistic, public health-oriented approach.”

The amendment goes on to say the director of the new agency
would have “non-law-enforcement experience in community safety
services, including but not limited to public health and/or restorative
justice approaches.” It also provides for a division of licensed peace
officers who would answer to the department's director.

Ten years from now, Council member Steve Fletcher predicted,
everybody will be looking to emulate the Minneapolis model.

“The path that we're going to chart will steal the best ideas from
everywhere and combine them in away that is uniquely appropriate
to our city,” he said.

The board of the city’s police union called the move “irresponsible”
without a clear plan for what comes next.

“Politicians are good at making promises, but not at following
through on them, and voters should be wary of any promises that
delivered by the City Council about how they will figure it out when
and if the charter amendment passes,” it said in a statement.

Some activists against police brutality were displeased, too. The
Twin Cities Coalition for Justice for Jamar, named for a black man
who died in a 2015 confrontation with police, said the amendment
would leave power in the hands of the council and mayor’s
office, which it said have already failed. The coalition wants the
department under community control via a new elected civilian
council with the power to hire, fire and prosecute officers.

Civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong, a sharp critic of the
department, said the move is premature and counterproductive to
building trust with the Black community amid the current uptick in
crime.

“There are a lot of people in the African American community
who are anxious, who are fearful, who are concerned about the
irresponsibility of the Minneapolis City Council and the failure to
articulate a clear plan of action on what to expect, and they want an
opportunity to weigh in on that,” Armstrong said.

Council members who support the change wanted to seize on a
groundswell of support for significant policing changes following
Floyd’s death. If they don’t get the charter change on the November
ballot, their next chance won't come until November 2021, they say.
The measure faces some time pressure to be finalized and clear a
potential mayoral veto in time to make this fall’s ballot.

Mayor Jacob Frey, who opposes abolishing the department, said
he’s concerned by the draft amendment.

Frey said when something goes wrong now, the chief and the
mayor are accountable. Under the new plan, which would have the
council appoint a director of the new agency, accountability would
be spread among 14 people. Frey, who has said he supports deep
structural changes in the existing department, questioned whether
policing practices would vary based on ward or other factors.

Suad Mire, 30, a receptionist at a mental health clinic, said she’s
“very torn” between supporting dismantling the police and whether
reforming the existing department should be the path toward
significant change. Mire said she wants to see an end to police
brutality but doesn’t know if a society can function without law
enforcement. She fears a reduced presence by officers citywide
may lead to an increase in violence.

“| just feel like they should be better trained, have new officers
and their training should be at least a little longer ... and if a police
Officer that lives deep down in the suburbs, if they’re going to work
in the city then they should know the surroundings and the civilians
that are from that city and protect them,” she said. “But I’m not sure
about dismantling them.”
Thousands show up for black
trans people in nationwide protests
By Lauren Holt

Black transgender activist Raquel Willis stood on the deck of the
Brooklyn Museum on Sunday and led thousands of protesters in
a chant.

“I believe in my power,” she said, as people in the crowd echoed
the words back. “I believe in your power. I believe in our power.
I believe in black trans power.”

The Black Trans Lives Matter rally in New York, one of many
nationwide, came after two black trans women -- Dominique
“Rem’Mie” Fells, 27, of Philadelphia, and Riah Milton, 25, of Cin-
cinnati, Ohio -- were murdered last week.

There have been 14 reported murders of trans and gender
non-conforming people -- including Fells and Milton --since the
start of 2020, according to the Human Rights Campaign. But
the number of deaths of trans people are likely undercounted,
the Human Rights Campaign said in its report on anti-transgen-
der violence in the US in 2019. Sunday’s protest also took place
amid global demonstrations in support of the Black Lives Mat-
ter movement, which has surged in the wake of George Floyd’s
death.

It also followed the Trump administration’s announcement that it
is eliminating an Obama-era regulation prohibiting discrimination
in health care against patients who are transgender.

Led by and centered around black trans women, Sunday’s march
and rally in New York gave trans and gender non- conforming
people the opportunity to mourn lives lost, and to vocalize their
demand for justice and fair treatment.

“We can’t just talk about trans people when they’re dying,” Eliel
Cruz, one of the co-organizers of the event and director of com-
munications at NYC Anti-Violence Project, told CNN. “But what
are we doing actively and intentionally to create space for them
to be safe and well?”

Protesters wore white as a nod to black history

Protesters wore white and were asked to march silently for the
first portion of Sunday’s march.

Rally co-organizer Fran Tirado explained this decision was made
as a nod to black history. In 1917, nearly 10,000 demonstrators
in New York City wore white as they participated in the NAACP’s
Silent Protest Parade, one of the first public demonstrations of
civil rights by black Americans.

“We felt that was a really powerful way to think about our action
in relation to a lot of others and how thinking on the metaphor
of like silence equals death and how everything comes together,”
Tirado, a queer writer and producer, told CNN.
“In the 1917 Silent Parade the men wore black while women and
children wore white,” co-organizer West Dakota explained ina
statement following the protest. “The decision to wear white was
to symbolize our unity, and also to take a stand against corporate
appropriation of the rainbow flag. We don’t need rainbow (mer-
chandise) to show our pride.”
The role of organizer in times of civil unrest has most often been
filled by the same black and brown people who themselves are
facing violence and mistreatment, Tirado said.
It was important to Sunday’s organizers -- a group made up pri-
marily of queer people of color, both black and non- black -- that
the legwork of organizing be done by non-trans folks, while keep-
ing the spotlight on the partnering trans activists and organiza-
tions. “This collective of folks is particularly powerful because it’s
modeling what is possible when you do have allies and folks who
do care and also want to make sure that they’re building some-
thing that speaks to the hearts of the actual people that they’re
representing,” Willis told CNN in an interview. “So often that
doesn’t happen.”
Melania Brown, the sister of Layleen Polanco, was among the
speakers at the New York rally on Sunday. Polanco, an AfroLatinx
transgender woman, died in June of 2019 while being held in soli-
tary confinement following an epileptic seizure at Riker’s Island.
“Black trans lives matter,” Brown told the crowd. “My sister's life
mattered. All of the loved ones we have lost, all of these beauti-
ful girls that we have lost. There lives matter. We have to protect
them.”

Protest partners were all trans-based support

organizations

While Sunday’s protest came in response to the murders of Fells
and Milton, organizers emphasized the necessity to fight for trans
lives beyond seeking post-mortem justice.
Like Fells and Milton, the majority of trans people killed are black
women. Ninety-one percent of the reported murders of trans and
gender non-conforming people in 2019 were black women, and
81% were under the age of 30, according to the Human Rights
Campaign, which tracks reported killings. Violence against the
transgender community often goes unreported or misreported,
as a result of authorities, media reports, and family members
misidentifying the dead, the Human Rights Campaign said. All of
the partners in Sunday’s protest are trans-based support organi-
zations that provide both immediate and longterm assistance to
trans people, organizers said.
The Okra Project delivers free meals to trans and gender non-
conforming individuals who are experiencing food insecurity. Gays
and Lesbians Living In a Transgender Society (G.L.I.T.S) facilitates
assistance, including health care and housing, for transgender sex
workers. The organization is nearing its $1 million fundraising goal
following a surge in donations, said Ceyenne Doroshow, G.L.I.T.S
founder, on Sunday.

Nationwide solidarity

New York City wasn’t the only place where trans activists and
allies mobilized.

In Los Angeles on Sunday, an estimated 25,000 people
marched through Hollywood during an All Black Lives Matter
protest, CNN agliate KTLA reported. The march was meant to
honor Tony McDade, a black transgender man who was shot by
a Tallahassee police ogcer last week.

Protesters carried rainbow flags and balloons, as an aircraft
overhead pulled a “Black Lives Matter” banner. “The protest is
in direct response to racial injustice, systemic racism, and all
forms of oppression,” the Black LGBTQIA Advisory Board Coun-
cil, which organized the protest, said on its website.

A group of people in Chicago organized a Drag March for
Change this weekend. They demanded justice for victims of
police brutality, as well as a reclassification of violence against
transgender individuals as hate crimes, CNN agliate WLS re-
ported.

In Boston, thousands chanted “no justice, no peace, no an-
ti-trans violence on our streets” as they marched from Franklin
Park to Nubian Square, CNN agliate WCVB reported.

“We know that black people are vulnerable -- especially vulner-
able in this society -- and especially trans folks and trans black
folks,” protester Khery Petersen-Smith told WCVB. “So I think
it’s important we all show up and build solidarity.”
THE DEMANDS OF THE COLLECTIVE BLACK VOICES AT
FREE CAPITOL HILL TO THE GOVERNMENT OF SEATTLE,
WASHINGTON

demands transcribed by @irie_kenya and @AustinCHowe

In credit to the people who freed Capitol Hill, this List of demands
is neither brief nor simplistic. This is no simple request to end police
brutality. We demand that the City Council and the Mayor, whoever
that may be, implement these policy changes for the cultural and
historic advancement of the City of Seattle, and to ease the struggles
of its people. This document is to represent the black voices who
spoke in victory at the top of 12th & Pine after 9 days of peaceful
protest while under constant nightly attack from the Seattle Police
Department. These are words from that night, June 8th, 2020.

Justice System Demands:

1. The Seattle Police Department and attached court system are
beyond reform. We do not request reform, we demand abolition.
We demand that the Seattle Council and the Mayor defund and
abolish the Seattle Police Department and the attached Criminal
Justice Apparatus. This means 100% of funding, including existing
pensions for Seattle Police. At an equal Level of priority we also
demand that the city disallow the operations of ICE in the city of
Seattle.

2. In the transitionary period between now and the dismantlement of
the Seattle Police Department, we demand that the use of armed
force be banned entirely. No guns, no batons, no riot shields, no
chemical weapons, especially against those exercising their First
Amendment right as Americans to protest.

3. We demand an end to the school-to-prison pipeline and the
abolition of youth jails. Get kids out of prison, get cops out of
schools. We also demand that the new youth prison being built in
Seattle currently be repurposed.

4. We demand that not the City government, nor the State
government, but that the Federal government Launch a full-scale
investigation into past and current cases of police brutality in
10.

at;

Seattle and Washington, as well as the re-opening of all closed
cases reported to the Office of Police Accountability. In particular,
we demand that cases particular to Seattle and Washington be
reopened where no justice has been served, namely the cases of
losia Faletogo, Damarius Butts, Isaiah Obet, Tommy Le, Shaun Fuhr,
and Charleena Lyles.

We demand reparations for victims of police brutality, in a form to
be determined.

We demand that the City of Seattle make the names of officers
involved in police brutality a matter of public record. Anonymity
should not even be a privilege in public service.

We demand a retrial of all People in Color currently serving a
prison sentence for violent crime, by a jury of their peers in their
community.

We demand decriminalization of the acts of protest, and amnesty
for protestors generally, but specifically those involved in what has
been termed “The George Floyd Rebellion” against the terrorist
cell that previously occupied this area known as the Seattle Police
Department. This includes the immediate release of all protestors
currently being held in prison after the arrests made at 11th and
Pine on Sunday night and early Saturday morning June 7th and
8th, and any other protesters arrested in the past two weeks of the
uprising, the name Evan Hreha in particular comes to mind who
filmed Seattle police macing a young girl and is now in jail.

We demand that the City of Seattle and the State Government
release any prisoner currently serving time for a marijuana-related
offense and expunge the related conviction.

We demand the City of Seattle and State Government release any
prisoner currently serving time just for resisting arrest if there are
no other related charges, and that those convictions should also
be expunged.

We demand that prisoners currently serving time be given the full
and unrestricted right to vote, and for Washington State to pass
legislation specifically breaking from Federal law that prevents
felons from being able to vote.

12. We demand an end to prosecutorial immunity for police officers in
the time between now and the dissolution of the SPD and extant
justice system.

13. We demand the abolition of imprisonment, generally speaking, but
especially the abolition of both youth prisons and privately-owned,
for-profit prisons.

14. We demand in replacement of the current criminal justice system
the creation of restorative/transformative accountability programs
as a replacement for imprisonment.

15.We demand autonomy be given to the people to create localized
anti-crime systems.

16. We demand that the Seattle Police Department, between now
and the time of its abolition in the near future, empty its “Lost and
found” and return property owned by denizens of the city.

17. We demand justice for those who have been sexually harassed or
abused by the Seattle Police Department or prison guards in the
state of Washington.

18.We demand that between now and the abolition of the SPD that
each and every SPD officer turn on their body cameras, and that
the body camera video of all Seattle police should be a matter of
easily accessible public record.

19. We demand that the funding previously used for Seattle Police be
redirected into:
Socialized Health and Medicine for the City of Seattle.
Free public housing, because housing is a right, not a privilege.
Public education, to decrease the average class size in city schools
and increase teacher salary.
Naturalization services for immigrants to the United States living
here undocumented. (We demand they be called “undocumented”
because no person is illegal)
General community development. Parks, etc.
Economic Demands:

1. We demand the de-gentrification of Seattle, starting with rent
control.

2. We demand the restoration of city funding for arts and culture to
re-establish the once-rich Local cultural identity of Seattle.

3. We demand free college for the people of the state of Washington,
due to the overwhelming effect that education has on economic
success, and the correlated overwhelming impact of poverty on
people of color, as a form of reparations for the treatment of Black
people in this state and country.

4. We demand that between now and the abolition of the SPD that
Seattle Police be prohibited from performing “homeless sweeps”
that displace and disturb our homeless neighbors, and on equal
footing we demand an end to all evictions.

5. We demand a decentralized election process to give the citizens
of Seattle a greater ability to select candidates for public office
such that we are not forced to choose at the poll between equally
undesirable options. There are multiple systems and policies in
place which make it impractical at best for working-class people
to run for public office, all of which must go, starting with any fees
associated with applying to run for public office.

Health and Human Services Demands:

1. We demand the hospitals and care facilities of Seattle employ
black doctors and nurses specifically to help care for black
patients.

2. We demand the people of Seattle seek out and proudly
support Black-owned businesses. Your money is our power and
sustainability.

3. We demand that the city create an entirely separate system staffed
by mental health experts to respond to 911 calls pertaining to
mental health crises, and insist that all involved in such a program
be put through thorough, rigorous training in conflict
de-escalation.
Education Demands:

1. We demand that the history of Black and Native Americans
be given a significantly greater focus in the Washington State
education curriculum.

2. We demand that thorough anti-bias training become a legal
requirement for all jobs in the education system, as well as in the
medical profession and in mass media.

3. We demand the City of Seattle and State of Washington remove
any and all monuments dedicated to historical figures of the
Confederacy, whose treasonous attempts to build an America with
slavery as a permanent fixture were an affront to the human race.

Although we have liberated Free Capitol Hill in the name of the
people of Seattle, we must not forget that we stand on land already
once stolen from the Duwamish People, the first people of Seattle, and
whose brother, John T. Williams of the Nuu-chah-nulth tribe up north
was murdered by the Seattle Police Department 10 years ago.

Black Lives Matter — ALL day, Every day.
 

FROM ATLANTA TO PALESTINE: OUR STRUGGLES ARE
INTERTWINED

Da’Shaun Harrison, Eva, Bisan, and Osama // Wear Your Voice Magazine // June 18, 2020

Over the span of mere days, Atlantans have bore witness to yet another
murder of a Black person at the hands of police, the resignation of police
chief Erika Shields, and uprisings against state violence continue to
press on. Following the now-former police chief’s resignation, over eight
other police officers resigned from their posts, citing “low morale” as their
reasoning. In Shields’s absence, it has been reported that Deputy Chief
Rodney Bryant would step in as the interim police chief.

In 2014, the Atlanta Police Department (APD) published a press release
noting that Bryant had “completed a two-week public safety program and
exchange focused on new public safety techniques and technologies.” This
training took place in apartheid israel through the Georgia International Law
Enforcement Exchange (GILEE)—a program that APD has supported since
it was founded in 1992. GILEE’s sole purpose is to serve as a cross-national
service for Georgia officers to learn “best practices on counterterrorism
measures” from the Zionist Entity.

Instead of aligning herself with the impoverished and otherwise marginalized
Black Atlantans who suffer the violence of the american empire, our mayor,
Keisha Lance Bottoms, and her underlings have fully stepped into their role
as members of The Establishment and the Black Elite, using their position
as Black (mis)leaders to aid in the perpetuation of global anti-Blackness

by appointing Bryant to this position. This is not new for her. In fact, both
through her tenure as mayor and previously as a member of city council,
Keisha Lance Bottoms has made it her business to undermine progress
towards liberation—even going so far as to use her authoritative position to
expand the powers of the police state.

For upwards of a decade, organizers and community members in Atlanta
have called for APD to withdraw its participation in GILEE, all to no avail.

In tandem with other police departments in the Atlanta Metro area, these
officers return to our city equipped, prepared, and enthusiastic to reproduce
terroristic violence on Black people like Kathryn Johnston, Alexia Christian,
Anthony Hill, Nicholas Thomas, Jamarion Robinson, Caine Rogers, Oscar
Cain, Jimmy Atchison, D’ettrick Griffin, and now Rayshard Brooks. As we
have witnessed in these three weeks of protests, alone, they have the state-
backing and the resources to tear gas us, shoot us with their rubber bullets,
and even threaten the use of a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD). This
is only made possible by this city’s (mis)leaders’ commitment to our deaths
through state-sanctioned murder—in all of its varying forms.

In Palestine, the Zionist Entity’s colonial system ensures the continued
subjugation of the Palestinian people through mass movement restrictions,
home demolitions, theft of water and land, mass incarceration, and the
denial of Palestinian refugees from returning to their land. The Zionist
Entity’s commitment to Palestinian death is epitomized by its overwhelming
military assaults on Gaza which have killed thousands. In spite of the Zionist
Entity's crimes committed against the Palestinian people, the Palestinian
Authority operates only to secure its political hegemony and capital. In
parallel with the Black (mis)leadership, these Palestinian compradors claim
that partnership with the Zionists is necessary for the sake of peace and
state-development. These claims ring hollow for the Palestinian masses,
who continue their just struggle against Zionist settler-colonialism.

To this point, the Zionist Entity’s police execution of Eyad Hallaq just

a few weeks ago mirrors that of Rayshard Brooks's; their deaths exist
harmoniously in that both america and the Zionist Entity are made
“legitimate” only through the continued murders of Black and Palestinian
people. The priorities of the Atlanta government and the Zionist Entity are in
contradiction to the safety of our peoples.
As it is also Pride month, let it be known that we will not accept empty
gestures of TLGBQ+ support by our so-called leaders under the guise

of being “progressive.” In an orientalist effort to justify its existence and
pander to neoliberal sentiments, the Zionist Entity carries out “pinkwashing,”
presenting itself to the world as “the only democratic state in the Middle
East” which allows the free expression of TLGBQ¢+ individuals in its

society. In reality, the IDF has been known to entrap queer Palestinians

and threaten outing them to their families, humiliating them if they do not
agree to collaborate with the oppressive israeli regime. Zionist missiles do
not change direction when a queer Palestinian is in range. Furthermore, to
paint itself as queer-friendly, the Zionist Entity hosts yearly pride parades
and festivals and asserts that it “adamantly protects the rights of its gay
citizens,” much like how “rainbow capitalism” pervades Atlanta in its effort to
live up to “the city too busy to hate.”

Atlanta paints the crosswalks of white, affluent parts of this city with colors
of the rainbow while its leadership actively proposes legislation that would
further criminalize sex work—an occupation disproportionately engaged
by Black trans people in this city. Atlanta’s leadership hired a white lesbian
woman to be APD's police chief while at least 1/3 of this city’s homeless
youth remain TLGBQ+. Annually, there are Pride events for the entire month
of June and for a week in September, yet APD remains the greatest threat
to Black trans women in this city. Overwhelmingly, rainbow capitalism and
pinkwashing are used as propagandizing tools by america and apartheid
israel to discard of queer and trans Black and Palestinian people, and to
project a faux image of progressivism by co-opting our movements.

All of these things considered, this is a statement—written in its entirety

by Black and Palestinian radical organizers—intended to condemn Bryant,
GILEE, and all other Black Atlanta and Zionist cops and politicians who give
their bodies and platforms to the maintenance of this white supremacist
imperialist capitalist patriarchy by way of borders, policing, and the
occupation of stolen land.

Bottoms'’s failure to halt APD’s participation in GILEE, as well as her failure
to end operation WHIPLASH, scale back Atlanta’s astronomical surveillance,
and make any notable contributions to the fight to stop the displacement

of legacy Black residents, brings her commitment to misleadership and the
ultimate “black on black crime” to a global scale.

In 2017, Da’Shaun Harrison wrote of Atlanta’s former mayor, Kasim Reed,
and other Black politicians:

“While the harm Black individuals encounter during daily survival are
frequently used to justify the flawed concept of ‘black-on-black crime’, the
audacious nature of white supremacy to use Black [folks’] bodies to further
an agenda for systemic eradication [of people and total movements] is the
true ‘black-on-black crime’, in that Black [folks’] bodies become agents of
the machine — white supremacy.

If white supremacy can recruit and weaponize Black American people to
advocate for and push its policies, it can undermine the importance of the
Black Liberation Movement and create what is ultimately the only and real
black-on-black crime.”

As this is the case, for the crimes committed against the people of our city
and for its collusion with the israeli ethnostate, we will disband the Atlanta
Police Department. As part of the abolition of APD, we intend to ensure that
no officer ever participates in an international law enforcement exchange
again. The points of alignment between Black people in Atlanta and the
Palestinian people are many, and have been named time and time again by
countless Black and non-Black Palestinian thought leaders, scholars, and
organizers. The most critical connection between these two bodies of people
is that we will forever resist the powers of white supremacy that have tried
and failed to kill us.

We write this in full solidarity with all oppressed peoples across the globe
who struggle under the thumb of imperialism. And more specifically, this is
a statement of solidarity between our two peoples, Palestinians and
Black people, as we resist against israeli and american genocide. It is
also a statement which seeks to name that the material collaboration of our
enemies demonstrates to us how connected we are as siblings in struggle.

As we continue to occupy the streets of Atlanta for the third week in a row,
we do so with a global analysis of imperialism, capitalism, Zionism, and anti-
Blackness. The only way we win is together, and we will win.
Israel rubberstamps 50 years of land theft
Aseel AlBajeh

The year 2020 is set to mark yet another reverse for Palestinian
hopes of self-determination and freedom from oppression.
From a US “Vision for Peace” in January offering Israel large parts
of the occupied West Bank to an Israeli unity government in May
promising to proceed with the illegal annexation of exactly such ter-
ritory, a new catastrophe is at the door. But why has Israel waited
for more than half a century to pursue formal annexation?
After all, the facts on the ground already constitute a de facto an-
nexation of the West Bank, which has been undertaken at no great
cost to Israel’s carefully constructed image as the “only democracy
in the Middle East,” along with the formal annexations of East Jeru-
salem and the Golan Heights (in Syria) all captured during the 1967
war.
The answer lies in systematic Israeli settler-colonial designs that
date back to 1948 and which seek the replacement of the indig-
enous population by an imported one. The delay in annexation
should be understood as a reflection of the West Bank’s demogra-
phy, which, with its large Palestinian population, had to be properly
prepared before any more formal move could be made. That prepa-
ration is now complete in significant parts of the West Bank.
Annexation of East Jerusalem
After its capture of the West Bank in 1967, Israel immediately and
illegally extended its jurisdiction and administration to East Jerusa-
lem and 28 surrounding villages. In 1980, it formally annexed East
Jerusalem, by passing the Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel.
Such rapid annexation came as a result of the demographic balance
in Jerusalem, which in 1967 was 74 percent Jewish to 26 percent
Palestinian.
Indeed, the demographic balance is fundamental to Israeli policy.
Until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, there was never a
Jewish majority in Palestine and it was only with the dislodgement
of more than half of all Palestinians from their homes and lands that
such a majority was secured.
Israel carefully controlled its population ratio between Jews and
non-Jews in the years between 1948 and 1967. By not allowing
refugees to return, destroying their villages and confiscating their
homes (with the 1950 Absentee Property Law — which even resulted
in the absurd “present absentee” category in order to confiscate the
homes of those who had been internally displaced) Israel worked
hard to maintain this Jewish majority.
As a result, the Jewish-Palestinian ratio was already in place in Jeru-
salem by 1967.
Since 1967, Israel has been working on maintaining this ratio in a
number of ways in the city: through discriminatory planning laws,
land expropriation and house demolitions, alongside ever-expanding
settlements.

One of the tools it has deployed — in the name of security — is the
construction of a massive wall in the West Bank. The route of the
wall is instructive. It has, in effect, been wrapped around 80 per-
cent of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, including all East Jerusalem
settlers. It has, therefore, paved the way for the annexation of the
largest settlements.

Michael Lynk, the UN‘s special rapporteur on the occupied West
Bank and Gaza, has noted that in Jerusalem large Palestinian neigh-
borhoods were deliberately located outside the wall. That obviated
any obligation to provide municipal services and cut off one third

of Palestinian Jerusalemites from the remainder of the West Bank.
Israel has also targeted those who remain. Palestinians in East Jeru-
salem are generally granted permanent residency status. They can
apply for citizenship, but that involves pledging loyalty to Israel.
Compelling Palestinians to swear allegiance to their occupiers is ille-
gal under international law and would imply that Palestinian Jerusa-
lemites recognize Israel’s annexation, something they have always
refused to do.

Since 1967, however, residency revocation has been one of many
policies aiming at forcibly transferring Palestinians out of the city.
Since 1995, such revocation can be imposed on any Palestinian

who cannot prove their “center of life” is in the city. In essence, if a
Palestinian Jerusalemite spends too much time away from the city,
they can lose their residency rights.

Since 2006, revocation can also be imposed punitively on the basis
of a “breach of allegiance,” defined loosely as a lack of loyalty to the
State of Israel.

More than 14,500 Palestinians from Jerusalem have lost their legal
status since 1967.

From de facto to de jure annexation

That Israel has decided it is time to turn de facto annexation into de
jure annexation at this moment should be read as signaling the suc-
cessful realization of Israel’s longstanding policy to annex the land
with the least Palestinian population.

It has taken half a century to create irreversible facts on the ground
that flipped the demographic reality in areas Israel did not want in
the West Bank.

As early as the fourth day of the 1967 war, Israel initiated its plan-
ning for settlements. As of 2019, there were just over 240 settle-
ments in the West Bank with more than 620,000 settlers.

Settler colonialism begins with settlement and proceeds by replacing
the original population.

An illustrative model of how Israel has effectively replaced the Pal-

 
estinian population is the Jordan Valley, which is part of the area
that the new Israeli government is reportedly seeking to annex,
amounting to almost 30 percent of the West Bank.

According to the Oslo accords, almost 90 percent of the Jordan Val-
ley was designated as being under full Israeli military and civilian
control. It is part of a zone known as Area C.

Despite the fact that the area was supposed to be transferred to the
Palestinian Authority’s jurisdiction within two years of the signing of
the Oslo accords in 1993, Israel maintained its control over security,
planning and construction. The Oslo accords and the “legal regime
of segregation” have enabled Israel to consolidate its sovereignty
there. Israeli settlers and Palestinians living in Area C are, therefore,
subject to separate legal systems. Settlers enjoy the protections
afforded by Israeli civilian law but Palestinians will be hauled before
military courts with a conviction rate of almost 100 percent.

Policies such as land appropriation, settlement building, exploitation
of the rich natural resources of the

area for the benefit of settlers, impediments to movement, and
nearly-impossible-to-obtain building

permits allowing Israel’s military a wide remit to demolish houses,
have all combined to create a hostile and coercive environment. for
indigenous Palestinians in the Jordan Valley.

The result has been the forcible transfer of the Palestinian population
from the area.

Before 1967, there were some 250,000 Palestinians in the area. By
2016, that number had shrunk to less than 54,000.

The Jordan Valley is not a unique case. Israel has prepared the West
Bank generally for formal annexation by creating a physical infra-
structure — with settlements, the wall and roads reserved for Israelis
— that leaves what Michael Lynk has called “a Palestinian bantustan,
an archipelago of disconnected islands of territory, completely sur-
rounded and divided up by Israel and unconnected to the outside
world.”

The lesson should have been long learned from Israel’s annexation
of East Jerusalem. Israel is not hiding its designs. And yet the world
cannot even agree on how to respond to such patently illegal behav-
ior.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell confirmed
that the EU is “far away” from sanctioning Israel on its recent annex-
ation plans of the West Bank.

This is the last chance for the world’s most powerful governments
and institutions to reconsider how they treat Israel. Third states
need to fulfill their obligations to bring to an end a situation that is
in clear transgression of international law, and not to render aid or
assistance to Israel.
It is not only Palestinians who will bear the consequences should the
world fail them now. The foundation of the entire post-Second World
War legal framework is in danger of collapse should Israel’s expan-
sionism be allowed to continue without serious repercussions.

An incomplete list of Annexation Day of Rage protests in the
us:
July 1
Online/National
+ Call on Congress to end the $3.8 billion in military funding to Israel
every year, and instead invest in Black communities, via US Cam-
paign for Palestinian Rights.
California
e Los Angeles: Day of Rage Car Caravan (10:30 am)
e San Diego: Day of Rage - No to Annexation Car
Caravan (12 pm)
* San Francisco: Car Caravan from the Civic Center to
Israeli Consulate (4:30 pm) Florida
e Miami: Say No to Annexation of Palestinian Land (4 pm)
Illinois
© Chicago (SW Suburbs): Day of Rage Rally & Car Caravan (4 pm)
New York
e NYC (Bay Ridge): Day of rage against Israeli annexation, racism
and repression (4 pm)
Oregon
e Portland: Palestinian Day of Rage (5 pm) July 5
Michigan
Detroit: Day of Rage: Land and Annexation (Note: this action in-
volves an interactive work day on a farm in Waawiiyatanong territo-
ry followed by a community discussion dinner and bonfire.)

 
Palestine and Israel: Mapping an annexation

 

 

    
     
     
         
     

1917
Pre-British Mandate
Palestine

Wi Palestinian

BB 3ewish

‘On October 31, 1917, British forces conquered
Palestine from the Ottoman-Turks, ending
1,400 years of Islamic rule over the region.

Before the British Mandate in Palestine,
Jews made up around six percent of the
total population.

   

 

  

1918-1947 Jewish immigration
Jewish immigration
from Europe

Hl Palestinian

HB 3ewish

 
   
       
  

Jaffa

  
   
      
 
    
 
   
     
 
     
 
      

Under the British Mandate, the
Jewish population in Palestine
increased from 6 percent (1918)
to 33 percent (1947).

1948
Palestinians expelled

Il Palestinian

BB 'sracti

> Armistice “Green” Line
(Created in 1949) Gaza

  

Zionist military forces expelled at least
750,000 Palestinians and captured
78 percent of historic Palestine.

 

The remaining 22 percent was divided
into the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

 

 
 
 

 

1967

 
   
    
   
    
  
 
 

ia's:
Israel occupies Gaza Golan Heights
and the West Bank
Palestinian Wweec Banik

(under Israeli occupation)

HB israeli

™ Egyptian and Syrian land Fang
occupied by Israel ao

Jerusalem
Gaza

During the June 1967 War, |
Israel occupied all of historic (
Palestine and expelled a

further 300,000 Palestinians =
from their homes, y

 
 
  
 
 
 
  
  
  
  
  
 

1993 & 1995
Oslo accords

Palestinian |
(under Israeli occupation)

Wi isracti

] Area C - (Palestinian p
under Israeli control)

The occupied West Bank
was divided into three areas
-A, Band C - as part of the

Oslo Accords, signed by the Under, Under
Palestine Liberation Organization Palestinian Israeli
(PLO) and Israel. Control Control

2020
How big are Palestine and Israel?

;—— 6,020 km? 1

 

East derussion: 56770 km2
eee ee
5,655 krné , ™

     

uth Affica {400 km),
x |, Canada (575 krn*), El Saivader (21041

Detror, US (370 kn’ Slovenia (20,273 krn’
Shertieid, UK (367 kr?) Brasilia, Braz (S.802 ier”), Bengkuls, Indonesia 19519 in’

Lucknow: india ($49 kn?) Brune’ 6,765 Am) Gauteng, South Africa [18,176 ki é

New Jersey,

   

Surface areas as per the 1949 Green Line boundaries. @AILabs ayatema

 

 
Freedom In The World
By Sharky Loko
incarcerated artist, organizer, & abolitionist

Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily
against them because of their color of their skin, those who
let the murderers of Blacks remain free, protecting them,
and further punishing the Black population because they de-
mand their legitimate rights as free people, How can those
who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom???
South Amerika, like the global south, suffers the same mis-
eries, you see it on a daily basis, captured on film same way
you see these murderous pigs killing people of color on live
t.v. This is the time and era where us the hungry will be
hungry no more, the landless will be landless no more, it is
time for the peasant, the exploited worker to write his-her-
story.

This is a struggle of masses and ideas which will be car-
ried out by US the people that have been mistreated and
scorned by imperialism. The government likes to see us as
their submissive flock, but is not the people that should fear
the government, it is the government that should fear the
people!! This system is so terrified to even admit that when
they see us in unity, out on the street, barrio and dungeons
demanding change, real world social change, freedom, as
we sing Fuck The Police! The system and its entire body of
regimes and governments! That it is then in that moment
that the empire sees the end of an era materializing, they
see their own grave diggers, it is during this beautiful time
of change that the silent will be silent no more, the once
anonymous mass will begin to write hisherstory with OUR
own blood —- by any means necessary.

It is not a crime to want freedom, it is not a crime to believe
in something, it is not a crime to be human and exist!!! It is
not a fucking crime to take back and reclaim what has been
stolen from us all. Our birth right to freedom and our land —
the revolution has been cooking for over 500 years in a pot
called colonialism. This is the revolution of the world.

It is time for direct actions, it is this wave of anger that
comes from being oppressed that is sweeping across the
land of the planted at this level for the very first time, awak-
ening the oppressed from the long, brutalizing sleep, this
“dream” to which we all have been subjected to.
People are politakly conscious more now than ever of whats
really going on. A few years back it was a difficult task to
get people in the hood/dungeon talking about oppression,
decolonization, now you see that almost in every corner, cell
block, cage, and project yard — you hear the usual FTP fol-
lowed by a lumpen organization, BLM, or a viva my gente!!
A true activist revolutionary, abolitionist, humanitarian,
member of the community, a true leader is guided by a
greater feeling of love. It leads by example. In most cases,
the peoples unity becomes our higher power in a material-
ized way. One knows you are true to our political line and
ideas when you are capable of feeling deeply at any injus-
tice committed against anyone anywhere in the world — this
is the most beautiful quality of a revolutionary.

“Hungry People Don’t Stay Hungry Forever”
“The Future Is Now”
In struggle & solidarity
Sharky Loko
Vitale also noted curfews are often enforced by officers from multiple jurisdictions — like
state police and the National Guard — who “may have no familiarity with these commu-
nities” they're sent in to police, which could lead to unnecessary tensions or violence.
‘They may, for example, not be attuned to the kinds of hours that people in a given area
work or what normal patterns of public movement are like there — useful knowledge,
since not everyone will get the memo that there is a curfew in effect. That in turn means
police could arrest people who have no intention of defying a curfew.

Exmples of the negative, even dangerous, interactions with law enforcement that curfews
can create went viral Saturday night. In Minneapolis, critics have posted videos of police
officers who appeared to be enforcing the curfew overzealously. Tanya Kerssen, who lives
in the city, tweeted that the officers shot paint canisters at her while she was on her own
porch, while shouting “light em up”

Ritchie, the Barnard researcher, is deeply skeptical of curfews — which put more police on
the street and empower them to behave repressively in a tense situation — as an effective
policing mechanism when animosity toward police is fueling the protests in the first place.
“If the source of uprising and resistance is police brutality, then imposing a curfew that
creates more opportunities for police brutality is definitely not the answer,’ she said.
Ritchie pointed out that during the Detroit protests in the summer of 1967, which began
after a police raid on an unlicensed bar, “alleged curfew violations were the basis of police
killings and much police violence.” After protests end, events like this are remembered,
and only increase friction between police and communities, particularly communities of
color.

She also argued that in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, mass arrests under a
sweeping curfew order represent an inappropriate kind of overreach that could exacerbate
public health crises.

‘That is of particular concern as the US struggles to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
Arrests could lead to extra financial burdens during a period of economic downturn and
increase the risk of Covid-19 spread in jails and police stations. Not to mention that at
least some arrested for curfew violations come from the black and Latino communities
hardest hit by the pandemic.

And critics argue the haphazard way many government officials have been going about
imposing the orders also has the potential to disproportionately harm the poor and people
of color.

For example, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot gave merely 35 minutes’ notice to the public
when she announced a curfew on Saturday for 9 pm. Many — including the American
Civil Liberties Union of Illinois — pointed out that it was unfair to issue the order while
public transportation was suspended, restricting Chicagoans’ ability to get home quickly.
Lower-income people who can't afford to call a ride-hailing service are particularly likely
to be vulnerable to arrest in such situations,

Local government officials, on the other hand, see curfews as a tool for maintaining order
when protests threaten to spiral out of control and create property damage or deaths.
When explaining her abruptly issued curfew, Lightfoot said the protest “situation has
clearly devolved, and we've stepped in to make the necessary arrests”

In some cases, the threat of arrest could work short-term in persuading certain protesters
to get off the streets. But when curfews result in confrontations between police and the
people — whether they're out deliberately or caught by accident — it's likely to cause long-
term damage to community trust in police.
Videos show the police aren’t neutral. They’re counterprotesters.
Vox, June 2, 2020

By now, millions of Americans have seen the
videos.

Police officers surrounding protesters, beating them with batons. An officer
apparently spraying mace at a little girl. Police cars plowing into a crowd of people,
knocking them to the ground.

To many watching, the lesson of such images was clear. As New York Times
Magazine writer Carvell Wallace put it, at the protests around the country after the
killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, police aren’t a neutral party.
They're counterprotesters.

As protests spread in the past few days, police have flocked to affected neigh-
borhoods, often wearing riot gear and sometimes arriving hours before protesters.
Their stated goal is to keep the peace. But it’s become abundantly clear that many
are far from neutral — instead, they are treating protesters like the enemy, lashing
out violently, using disproportionate force, and attacking people who pose no threat
to them.

“The tone that we felt from the police is: This is their rally,” Dae Shik Kim Jr.
told the New York Times. Kim had shared a video of his friend in Seattle who was re-
peatedly punched while being detained. “They are going to control it from the begin-
ning. They are going to dictate what happens. It’s a very offensive type of approach.”

The thousands of protesters around the country are rising up against police
violence as a whole — not just the death of an individual. In response, police appear
to be taking the protests personally, and it could lead to a disproportionate amount of
violence from officers determined to maintain the status quo.

Since the protests began in response to Floyd’s killing last week, police officers
have again and again been captured on video attacking protesters. These videos —
many of them graphic and disturbing — often show police seeming to treat protesters
like an opposing army, rather than like citizens they’re sworn to protect.

[videos feature]

* Brooklyn cops yelling at demonstrators to “move back", protestors retreatring with
arms raised above their heads. A few people back into a bench on the sidewalk.
Before they can continue to move backwards, a group of 10+officers beat the pro-
testors with clubs, not allowing them to get up and continue their retreat

* An NYPD SUV is parked in front of a metal barricade. Behind the barricade, protes-
tors are yelling and throwing empty water bottles. The SUV suddenly jumps into
motion and accelerates ten feet into the crowd, knocking over the barricade and
many demonstrators.

* In Seattle, a nine year old girl who has been maced crying and holding tight to a
man, presumaly her father, yelling “help me! it burns” while a crowd of protesters
come to her aid with eye rinse she continues to scream. Behind her, we see pro-
testors yelling at cops: “She's a little girl, what is wrong with you”

* Accrowd of protesters gather on a street in Dallas. They chant “No Justice, No
Peace”. Officers stand in a line ten feet away from the front of the crowd. An air-
horn comes from the side of protestors, signaling dispersement. As protestors
move away, an officer opens fire and launches tear gas cannisters at the crowds as
they move away.

The job of law enforcement officers, according to the authorities who have
called on them in recent days, is to keep the public safe. South Carolina Gov. Henry
McMaster, for example, said in a press conference on Sunday that officers are “here

 

 
to protect people and property.”

But the police, in many situations, have appeared to actively work against pub-
lic safety. It’s hard to imagine how macing a child, or driving a car into a crowd of
people, could possibly be intended to keep anyone safe.

Instead, the police seem clearly to be treating protesters — members of the
public — as adversaries. As Mara Gay writes at the New York Times, “an army of pub-
lic servants entrusted to protect Americans treated them as an enemy instead.”

This seems to be happening not despite the fact that the protests are about po-
lice brutality, but because of it. Previous research shows that police are more likely to
use force against protesters when the subject of the protest is police violence, Shaila
Dewan and Mike Baker report at the Times. Police are also more likely to use violence
against protesters of color than against white demonstrators.

Now “there’s deep resentment on the part of the police that so many people are
angry at them, and they’re lashing out,” Alex Vitale, a sociologist at Brooklyn College,
told the Times. “Look at what we saw — people sitting on their own stoops getting hit
with pepper balls. Anyone who looks at them funny, they’re attacking them.”

That’s why Wallace, the Times Magazine writer, and others have argued that in pro-
tests against police brutality, the police should be seen as counterprotesters. Their
interests are fundamentally at odds with those of the protesters, who want to see
them stripped of their power to harass, assault, and even kill people with impunity.
And it’s clear from the events of recent days that police are willing to use more vio-
lence to defend that power.

Many have also compared the violent response to the current protests with police
behavior during anti-lockdown protests by conservative groups this spring. At those
protests, officers were largely peaceful and respectful toward the (mostly white)
crowds. One image from Lansing, Michigan, in particular, went viral: officers stoically
standing by as an unmasked white man screamed inches from their faces. Contrast
that with the images we've seen from recent days, of police swarming and beating
protesters or running them down from the safety of their vehicles.

At the time of the Michigan protests, Melanye Price, a political science professor at
Prairie View A&M University, told Vox that the police response would be very different
if the stay-at-home protesters were black. “Imagine 10 black men and rifles walking
up to any state capitol in the United States,” Price said. “They would be shot before
they ever made it up the steps.”

The protesters attacked on camera by police in recent days have been unarmed.
They certainly haven't been carrying rifles up the capitol steps. Yet the police have
treated them not just like a threat but like an opponent.
CHICAGO

Bridgeporters Say Bat-Wielding Vigilantes
Are Terrorizing Peaceful Protesters, Neighbors

BRIDGEPORT — Amid a week of unrest around the city, a group of mostly
white men flooded a Bridgeport street corner Wednesday night wielding

baseball bats, lead pipes and two-by-fours.

It was a scene that alarmed many residents and drew a rebuke from Mayor

Lori Lightfoot, who said Chicago cannot tolerate vigilantes.

“Itis absolutely not appropriate for people to take up arms, bats,
pipes, whatever in ... patrolling neighborhoods,” the mayor said when asked
about the scene in Bridgeport.

“We're not about to allow that practice here in Chicago. If there's an issue, call 911.
| absolutely support neighbors being vigilant as to what's going on in their streets,
on their blocks, but taking up arms — that leads to chaos. We're not supporting
vigilantism.”

Over the last several days, looting, fires and violence erupted in
neighborhoods across the city, and some have taken to the streets to enforce
vigilante justice. In Little Village, there have been several instances of Black
drivers attacked by Latin King gang members wielding bats for coming into the
neighborhood.

On Wednesday night in Bridgeport, there were no reports of attacks by the
self-appointed guardians at 31st Street and Princeton Avenue, but several people
say they were illegally harassed and intimidated by men with weapons while the
Chicago Police did nothing about it.

Tanya Rosin, an attorney who lives on the border of McKinley and Brighton
Park, said she was driving home from a peaceful protest in Bronzeville with Black
Lives Matter signs on her car when she was cut off by a BMW with lights on the
top and forced to pull over at 26th Street and Shields Avenue.

“Two of them got out and blocked our path forward with their bodies. One
stood only a few inches away from the front of my car while screaming at us to turn
around and leave and the other one stood a couple of yards away from the driver
side of the car,” Rosin said

“I told them we were just trying to get home and they screamed at me that |
didn't live here. Their actions made it very difficult to turn around as there were
vehicles behind us,” she said.

When Rosin turned her car around, she tried to go south on Shields but was
blocked by a silver pickup truck flying the Chicago flag. A white man with brown
hair and wearing a hat was driving, she said.

“We finally managed to start going the opposite direction on 26th and were
able to turn south on Canal and get home safely. As we we turned around we saw
a police squad a few cars behind where we had been,” Rosin said. “They did
nothing to intervene.”

‘Asked about the incident, Chicago Police spokesperson Kellie Bartoli said
“there was no report made or arrests from this incident and further police service
was not necessary.”

 
In response to the allegations some officers were working with gangs in Little
Village, the department said “the Chicago Police Department does not condone any
type of violence.”

“There is no truth to the rumors that the Department is coordinating with gang
members, who terrorize their neighborhoods daily, in an effort to somehow
safeguard communities,” the statement read. “Gang members need to put their
guns down. We do not and will never tolerate attacks against anyone.”

Whitney Rosier, an art therapist who lives in Bridgeport, said she and her
husband attempted to walk to a peaceful protest in Bronzeville but were blocked
from crossing under the Dan Ryan Expressway by Chicago Police, who had most
streets barricaded. The couple tried to cross further north when they saw men with
bats and were followed by a car full of men, she said.

“Just so you know, my husband is Black and | am white,” Rosier said. “So, a car
came up behind us but we kept walking and they stopped because it was on a
street with a cul-de-sac, By the time we got to 31st and Princeton there was a
massive crowd of white men, most of them had bats. Some had pipes. I've never
seen anything like it. The police were there and wouldn't let us cross and this was
all to stop the quote-unquote ‘riots’ but there was nothing going on,” Rosier said.

Although the men did not say anything to her and her husband, Rozier said she
burst into tears.

“It was overwhelming to see how segregated it was. Bronzeville is mostly Black,
Bridgeport is mostly white. There's a huge police barricade, we're on one side and
we can't cross over. There's a large crowd of white men carrying weapons and the
Police are there like, ‘no problem,” Rosier said. She added that they met another
woman from the neighborhood who walked her and her husband home without
incident.

-Bob Chiarito of Block Club Chicago
White Suprema

t Infiltration of US Police Forces

   

An investigation published in 2019 by the Center for Investigative Reporting
found that hundreds of active-duty and retired law enforcement officers are
members of Confederate-sympathizing, anti-Islam, or anti-government militia
groups on Facebook. Within these private groups, members often are openly racist.

The Plain View Project, a database of public Facebook comments made by
nearly 2,900 current and former police officers in eight cities, suggested that nearly
1 in 5 of the current officers identified in the study made public posts or comments
that appear “to endorse violence, racism and bigotry,” as reported by Buzzfeed
News and Injustice Watch in a study of the database. For example, there are 1269
identified problematic posts from active duty Philadelphia police officers on the site
Of the 1073 Philadelphia police officers identified by the Plain View Project, 327 of
them posted public content endorsing violence, racism and bigotry. Of those 327, at
least 64 hold leadership roles within the force, serving as corporals, sergeants,
lieutenants, captains, or inspectors.

-Danielle Schulkin of JustSecurity.org
Forget “Looting.” Capitalism Is the Real Robbery. by William C Anderson

‘This morning the president of the United States threatened state-sanctioned murder in response
to “looting,” laying bare the way in which white supremacy, capitalism and the state work togeth-
er to violently repress people who defend Black life.

But Trump’ angry outburst is not the only blatantly racist response we should be interrogating,
‘We also must confront the way in which both conservatives and liberals have responded to the
Minneapolis uprisings by condemning “looting”

 

Protesters in Minneapolis and around the country are rising up against a lynching and state
violence. How should we respond to a lynching? Should our goal simply be to publicize it, in the
hope that such publicity will generate condemnation and prevent future lynchings? This logic is
flawed, in part, because lynchings thrive off of spectatorship. For white supremacists, the act of
killing is also an act of fellowship and opportunity for indoctrination.

Simply spreading images of racist killings and asking the state to stop killing us is not going to
stop them, (In fact, while it’s important to publicize the fact that these killings are occurring,
sometimes the spread of such images also galvanizes white supremacists.)

 

And so, for some who oppose racist killings, watching the videos, waiting to vote, and marching
in protest feels like enough. But for others, more intervention is needed. The murder of George
Floyd by Minneapolis police comes on the heels of the killings of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick,
Georgia, and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. These killings were committed by current
and former law enforcement. Understandably, outrage is growing.

‘We should expect uprisings. We should expect property to be damaged, as people rise up against
the racist systems complicit with racist violence. Many of the people taking part in these revolts
have decided that respecting property is not more important than respecting Black life. There

is an awareness that if the law doesn't respect Black life, then the law itself cannot be relied on
for protection or given undeserving respect. So, as protesters are being accused of “looting” and
“rioting” in Minneapolis or anywhere else, this time demands that we reflect on the systematic
robbery of Black America.

 

 

Corporations in the United States, again, have walked away with an unprecedented and astro-
nomical amount of money in 2020. With no accountability in sight, there was little to no oppo-
sition to their monumental robbery. They were handed trillions. Politicians working in service
to the corporate elite — and afraid of appearing opposed to a deal that would largely benefit
‘Wall Street — pushed it through. Of course, the deal left many vulnerable people in the dust. No
changes were made after the unresolved debt crisis of 2008 that brutalized people around the
world with the starvation we know as austerity. Cuts to social needs have fallen on the public
undeterred while the rich continuously grow richer than they've ever been,

Now, protests breaking out throughout the nation in response to police brutality foreshadow
what’ to come. People are likely to take, break and fight because conditions remain miserable.

It should not be surprising, Stil, the “looting” by the oppressed will always be condemned more
than the structural robbery that’s long taken place under capitalism.

‘There's this idea that the perpetrators of crises, rather than their victims, deserve our sympathy
when their profits decrease. After at least 100,000 people in the US. — disproportionately Black,
Native and Latinx people — have died from a merciless pandemic, this absurdity is still being
trafficked through the media. The corporations that do not pay people a living wage and who
are benefiting from skyrocketing prices amid disaster are not deserving of pity. For those of us
whose stability is much more uncertain, one missed paycheck could mean eviction, impris-
onment or hunger. These circumstances are increasingly common as unemployment reaches
levels not seen since the Great Depression. At least 40 million people in this country are out of
work, and people in need are being effectively robbed by the rich. As they lose their jobs, peo-
ple are also being robbed of health care — a vulnerability that will kill people and their family
members. People have also been robbed of a safe place to live free from state violence, where
they can breathe clean air. People have watched the tax money they paid be given away, time
and time again, after being told it would come back to workers, but it never does. For Black
America, there are more than enough prison beds, but not nearly enough hospital beds for a
population that’s being disproportionately crushed by institutional oppression. So, of course,
with little to no real infrastructure to protect people who the government has long neglected
and abandoned, there will be uprisings and people will take things. They will take because of
what's been taken from them: safety, security, housing, education, food and even their ability to
vote. And, of course, protesters are being robbed of the right to express their anger.

‘This conversation about “looting” always repeats itself. During virtually every Black uprising
that has taken place and shaped this country in the last century, the narrative has remained the
same. White supremacist assaults on the Black community were dubbed “race riots,’ and Black
protesters’ self-defense has been framed as senseless violence. People lament the destruction
of property because they've bought into the idea that it’s another wrong being committed on
top of any given white supremacist violence that caused it all. But stealing because you're being
sucked dry by a system that has rendered you disposable is not the same as the ritualistic racist
murders of Black people by white supremacists. Decades of “looting” stores during uprisings
can't measure up to what Wall Street has looted through the financial crises it creates.

‘They are certainly aware of their crimes. Hedge fund capitalists who amass endless amounts of
money through slush funds and financial manipulation have many avenues to escape account
ability. As the U.S. military prepares for “civil disturbances” and buys riot gear, it’s clear they
know that not all people will accept atrocity. In a nation that has never gotten past the civil war
it fought over a wealthy class not giving up slavery profits, defending the wealthy is a tradition.
‘The same people who created and currently benefit from the current crisis are intentionally
mismanaging plenty of other parts of our existence.

‘Those interested in liberation should not condemn protesters’ so-called “rioting” and “loot-
ing” Rather, we should be doing all we can to free the imprisoned protesters in Minnesota

and wherever else uprisings occur. The robbery we should concern ourselves with is the theft
perpetrated by a system that creates desperation where people in need have to go and take for
themselves what should be a guaranteed right. Capitalism encourages thievery from the top
down. Writing about the Haitian Revolution, the great writer C.L.R. James once said, “The rich
are only defeated when running for their lives.” It has certainly been the case time and time
again throughout Black history: People have overcome insurmountable odds to claim victories.
How should we answer the question, “What do we do in response to a lynching?” We must
make the very system that enables it run for its life.
Donations to businesses destroyed by looters and
rioters on Minneapolis' Lake Street surpass $2.5M
by Tim Harlow

Donors have given more than $2.5 million to help small businesses on Lake Street rebuild in the
aftermath of last week’s riots that caused widespread destruction.

By Monday afternoon, just four days after the fundraiser launched by the Lake Street Council
went live, more than 32,000 people had given money, with donations coming in furiously from the
metro area and from across the country, said Matt Kazinka, senior strategic initiatives manager
for the nonprofit, which advocates for hundreds of small businesses and organizations along the
busy south Minneapolis corridor.

“It's incredible to see how much care about Lake Street and a community like ours,” said Kazinka,
noting that a majority of businesses are owned by immigrants and people of color. “These busi-
nesses serve so many people and are home for so many people. It's not just the goods and ser-
vices they provide, but they are community centers.”

The council said it will take millions of dollars to rebuild the scores of businesses damaged during
the riots of the past few days, which erupted after the death of George Floyd, the 46-year-old
black man who died May 25 after he was restrained during an arrest.

Kazinka said the council will be drawing up guidelines in the coming weeks to determine how to
disburse the money.

To recognize the generosity, the council said it will use its own general operating funds to make a
“significant gift” to Floyd's family. All donations that come in will be allocated to businesses to help
them rebuild storefronts and reopen, the council said. Many businesses had already been strug-
ling economically in the wake of COVID-19 closures. Then the riots hit and delivered more dev-
astation. But thousands are stepping up, Kazinka said.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I'm thrilled about what this means for our community.”
Donations can be made on the council's website or at givemn.org.

Checks can be mailed to the council's office at 919 E. Lake St., Minneapolis, MN, 55407. But the
council warns it may not receive them for “some time” because mail delivery in the area has been
temporarily halted.

In a separate fundraiser for the Lake Street Business Association, Edina-based Inclusivi-Tee will
hold an online auction June 25-28. “Artists Who Share” will feature work from more than 40
established and new artists from the United States, as well as from Colombia, Kenya, the Nether-
lands, Argentina and England,
Social Media Missteps and
#BlackLivesMatter

* Social Media has been a powerful source of communication for organizers and protes-
tors. In recent actions, it’s been used to document police brutality, share safety in-
formation for demonstrators, and spread information about organizations people can
donate to from home

* Multiple social media trends have sparked as the Black Lives Matter movement has
begun to take action, some more helpful than others.

* “Ten Accounts Trend” - in which a person tagged ten people on their instagram story,
calling for them to “share” that Black Lives Mattered, and tag ten more accounts to
do the same

* “Blackout Tuesday” on June 2nd began as a push from the music industry, calling on
musicians who profit from black lives and culture to take a day off from self-promo-
tion and educate themselves on police brutality and other race issues. The trend was
created to increase attention for black artists and stories, but was quickly co-opted by
those wanting to perform their “support” - drowning out important information being
spread by organizers of actions by posting thousands of black squares on their insta-
gram feeds.

“Every little thing helps. Sitting behind a phone screen and tagging 10 accounts
in the name of activism doesn’t. If you are in a position of privilege, use it to help
others. If you are a public figure or a celebrity, publicly demonstrate actual tangible
support — make donations, sign and circulate petitions.” -affinity Magazine

Misinformation and Rumors: Debunked
New York Times - June 2, 2020

Untruths, conspiracy theories and other false information are running rampant online as the
furor over Mr. Floyd, an African-American man who was killed last week in police custody in
Minneapolis, has built. The misinformation has surged as the protests have dominated con-
versation.

At its peak on Friday, Mr. Floyd and the protests around his death were mentioned 8.8 mil-
lion times, said Zignal Labs, which analyzed global television broadcasts and social media. In
contrast, news of the Hong Kong protests reached 1.5 million mentions a day and the Yellow
Vest movement 941,000.

The collision of racial tensions and political polarization during the coronavirus pandemic has
supersized the misinformation, researchers said. Much of it is being shared by the conspiracy
group QAnon and far-right commentators as well as by those on the left, Mr. Brookie said...

Mistruths and their sources

* “George Floyd is alive” -The YouTube conspiracy channel JonXArmy shared a 22-minute
video that falsely asserted Mr. Floyd’s death had been faked. The video was shared nearly
100 times on Facebook, mostly in groups run by QAnon, reaching 1.3 million people, ac-
cording to data from a Facebook-owned tool that analyzes interactions across social media

+ “Antifa involvement” - The unsubstantiated theory that antifa activists are responsible for
the riots and looting was the biggest piece of protest misinformation tracked by Zignal
Labs, which looked at certain categories of falsehoods. Of 873,000 pieces of misinforma-
tion linked to the protests, 575,800 were mentions of antifa.
Minneapolis Park Board votes to end relationship with Minneapolis police, differentiate uniforms
Other organizations cutting ties with MPD after George Floyd killing,
By Miguel Otarola and Paul Walsh

‘The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board voted Wednesday night to sever its longtime
relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department, adding to the list of organizations
that have cut ties with the local police following the death of George Floyd at the hands of
its officers.

‘The University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Public Schools, museums and venues have
also chosen to limit or end their collaboration with the Police Department in the wake of
Floyd’s death May 25, which resulted in the firings and arrests of four officers.

‘The Park Board’s unanimous vote directs Superintendent Al Bangoura to immediately
stop using Minneapolis police officers to staff park-sanctioned events, and block park
police officers from responding to nonviolent Minneapolis police calls.

“Recent actions by the Minneapolis Police Department in the alleged murder of George
Floyd while in police custody have severely undermined community trust in, and sense
of safety around, Minneapolis Police,” the resolution read. “This ... does not support the
mission of the [Park Board] and has no place in our parks.”

Earlier Wednesday, Bangoura expressed little confidence that park and city police would
resume their working relationship anytime soon.

‘The Minneapolis Police Department “has a long road ahead of them,” he said. “We can’t
judge an entire department by the few, [but] there is a lot that is going to have to change.”
‘The Park Board’s police force is made up of 33 officers, 91% of whom live outside the city,
according to the board. Roughly 18% of the city of Minneapolis is Park Board land.
During the meeting, Chief Jason Ohotto of the park police said only 2% of serious violent
crimes occur on parkland.

‘The Minneapolis Police Department assists the park police when there are multiple calls
at a time, something which is common during the summer, Ohotto said. Its officers also
answer calls in parks in the early mornings.

Ohotto added he could not speak for the Minneapolis police if they would continue to
provide that emergency assistance following Wednesday's vote.

Bangoura said the Park Board's police would need to search for new partners to cover
nearly 2,000 employee hours it needs each year for events large and small. Those agencies
could be the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office, the State Patrol, Metro Transit police and
University of Minnesota police.

‘The vote was held after Park Board employees read an hour's worth of e-mails sent by resi-
dents, most of them supporting the resolution to cut ties with Minneapolis police.

A visibly shaken Bangoura, who is black, said during the meeting he was “angered, devas-
tated and heartbroken” to see the video of Floyd’s arrest.
“{ stand in solidarity with those seeking justice, as does the Minneapolis Park and
Recreation Board,” he said. “We denounce racism in all forms and we support and
promote justice”

‘The board also voted to create a safety plan that would address policing in the city’s
parks by June 17.

“We still have our park police. They will be focusing on our parks spaces,’ Park Board
President Jono Cowgill said. “This gives us a chance to step back and really have those
discussions on what policing looks like in our parks system?”

Other local organizations also announced they were cutting ties with the Minneapolis
Police Department on Wednesday.

‘The Walker Art Center announced it would no longer contract with city police for
security “for special events until the MPD implements meaningful change to by demil-
itarizing training programs, holding officers accountable for the use of excessive force,
and treating communities of color with dignity and respect”

‘The Minneapolis Institute of Art and First Avenue said they would not hire off-du-

ty Minneapolis police officers for their events. In a Twitter post, First Avenue said it
would “instead work with local organizations who represent our community, and who
will protect and affirm Black and Brown lives.”

In recent days, Minneapolis Public Schools officials said they would no longer have city
police act as school resource officers, terminating a $1.15 million annual contract with
the city. University of Minnesota President Joan Gabel said her school also was cutting
some ties with city police, including contracting off-duty security for football games,
concerts and ceremonies.

A park police squad car is visible in the viral video of Floyd’s arrest, stationed in front
of the Cup Foods while he was pinned to the pavement. Bangoura and Ohotto said
Wednesday that the officer was responding to a request for backup, that he was across
the street monitoring a vehicle and that he could not see what was happening to Floyd.

The park police was subject to its own public outcry in 2018 after a video showed its
officers handcuffing four Somali-American teens at Minnehaha Regional Park, yelling
and pointing a handgun at them. The Park Board paid $170,000 in recent months to
settle claims filed on behalf of the teens.

Commissioners and Ohotto on Wednesday decried the death of Floyd and the actions
of the Minneapolis police. Some said the Park Board now needs to focus on reforming
its own force.

“The Park Board has a small enough police force that we can actually make some real
change?’ said Commissioner Londel French, who is black. “If we don't do it the right
way, our communities burn”
MINNEAPOLIS CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS ANNOUNCE
INTENT TO DISBAND THE POLICE DEPARTMENT,
INVEST IN PROVEN COMMUNITY-LED PUBLIC SAFETY
by Jay Willis in The Appeal, June 7th
On Sunday afternoon, a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City
Council members will announce their commitment to disbanding the city’s
embattled police department, which has endured relentless criticism in the
wake of the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, on May

25.

“We're here because we hear you. We are here today because George
Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis Police. We are here because here in
Minneapolis and in cities across the United States it is clear that our ex-
isting system of policing and public safety is not keeping our communities
safe,” Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender said Sunday. “Our
efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period.”

The City Council’s decision follows those of several other high-profile
partners, including Minneapolis Public Schools, and the University of Min-
nesota, and Minneapolis Parks and Recreation, to sever longstanding ties
with the MPD.

“We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,”
tweeted Council Member Jeremiah Ellison on June 4, pledging to “dramat-
ically rethink” the city’s approach to emergency response. In a TIME op-
ed published the next day, Council Member Steve Fletcher cited the MPD’s
lengthy track record of misconduct and “decades-long history of violence
and discrimination”—all of which are subjects of an ongoing Minnesota
Department of Human Rights investigation—as compelling justifications
for the department's disbandment. “We can resolve confusion over a $20
grocery transaction without drawing a weapon or pulling out handcuffs,”
Fletcher wrote. ...

For years, activists have argued that MPD has failed to actually keep
the city safe, and City Councilmembers echoed that sentiment today
during their announcement. MPD’s record for solving serious crimes in
the city is consistently low. For example, in 2019, Minneapolis police only
cleared 56 percent of cases in which a person was killed. For rapes, the
police department’s solve rate is abysmally low. In 2018, their clearance
rate for rape was just 22 percent. In other words, four out of every five
rapes go unsolved in Minneapolis. Further casting doubt on the depart-
ment’s commitment to solving sexual assaults, MPD announced last year
the discovery of 1,700 untested rape kits spanning 30 years, which offi-
cials said had been misplaced.

The Council’s move is consistent with rapidly-shifting public opinion
regarding the urgency of overhauling the American model of law enforce-
ment. Since Floyd's killing and the protests that ensued, officials in Los
Angeles and New York City have called for making deep cuts to swollen
police budgets and reallocating those funds for education, affordable hous-
ing, and other social services. Law enforcement officers are not equipped
to be experts in responding to mental health crises, often leading to tragic
results—nationally, about half of police killings involve someone living with
mental illness or disability. As a result, public health experts have long
advocated for dispatching medical professionals and/or social workers,

not armed police, to respond to calls related to substance use and mental
health. Polling from Data for Progress indicates that more than two-thirds
of voters—68 percent—support the creation of such programs, versions of
which are already in place in other cities such as, Eugene, Oregon; Austin,
Texas; and Denver, Colorado.

“Our commitment is to do what is necessary to keep every single
member of our community safe and to tell the truth that the Minneapolis
Police are not doing that,” Bender said Sunday. “Our commitment is to end
our city’s toxic relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department, to end
policing as we know it, and to recreate systems of public safety that actu-
ally keep us safe.”
Minneapolis Board of Education votes to kick
police out of public schools over George Floyd’s
death by Valerie Strauss
‘The Minneapolis Board of Education, reacting to the killing of George Floyd in

police custody, is terminating its longtime contract with the city’s police depart-
ment
to provide security in school buildings.

The panel voted unanimously late Tuesday to end its relationship with the
department, which is now the subject of an investigation by the Minnesota state
government that Gov. Tim Walz (D) said is designed to root out “systemic racism
that is generations deep”

‘The city’s school board held a special virtual business meeting Tuesday solely to
discuss its contract with the police in reaction killing of Floyd, a 46-year-old black
man who died while handcuffed and being held down on the ground by officers,
with a knee pushed down on his neck.

I firmly believe that it is completely unnatural to have police in schools,’ Kimberly
Caprini, treasurer of the board, said during the discussion. She added that schools
that have close relationships with their school resource officers who are officers
could continue them with after-school activities, “but not to the degree” that has
existed for years.

Police officials did not respond Wednesday to queries about the board’s decision,
but Deputy Chief Erick Fors said in a Tuesday statement quoted by Minneapolis
media outlets: “The Minneapolis Police Department appreciated the opportunity
to
provide years of service to the Minneapolis Public Schools through the School
Resource Officer (SRO) program. The relationships that were built were impactful
not only for the students and staff, but for the officers who had a calling to work
with our youth through mentorship and engagement. We will continue to work in
cooperation with the Minneapolis Public Schools regarding safety and security
issues.”

School District Superintendent Ed Graff said on social media that he would engage
with students, staff and families over the summer to get input for a new security
arrangement for the next school year.

During the meeting, Nathaniel Genene, the student representative on the Board of
Education, said he had solicited the opinions of students about their priorities for
when school reopens, and he said they want to see, among other things, increased
access to mental-health care, restorative justice practices and the hiring of more
nurses, social workers and teachers of color.

“While actions taken tonight by the board will not in any way directly result in
justice for George Floyd and his family?’ he said, “it will show that real ... change is
possible”
Police “Reforms” You Should Always Oppose
by Mariame Kaba @prisonculture

| read today that President Obama has offered some measures for ‘reforming’ the
police.

Here is a simple guide for evaluating any suggested ‘reforms’ of U.S. policing in this
historical moment.

1. Are the proposed reforms allocating more money to the police? If yes, then you
should oppose them.

2. Are the proposed reforms advocating for MORE police and policing (under euphe-
mistic terms like ‘community policing’ run out of regular police districts)? If yes, then
you should oppose them.

3. Are the proposed reforms primarily technology-focused? If yes, then you should
oppose them because:

a. It means more money to the police.

b. Said technology is more likely to be turned against the public than it is to be used
against cops.

c. Police violence won't end through technological advances (no matter what some-
one is selling you).

4. Are the proposed ‘reforms’ focused on individual dialogues with individual cops?
And will these ‘dialogues’ be funded with tax dollars? | am never against dialogue.
It's good to talk with people. These conversations, however, should not be funded

by tax payer money. That money is better spent elsewhere. Additionally, violence is
endemic to U.S. policing itself. There are some nice individual people who work in
police departments. I've met some of them. But individual dialogue projects reinforce
the “bad apples” theory of oppressive policing. This is not a problem of individually
terrible officers rather it is a problem of a corrupt and oppressive policing system built
on controlling & managing the marginalized while protecting property.

What ‘reforms’ should you support (in the interim) then?

1. Proposals and legislation to offer reparations to victims of police violence and their
families.

2. Proposals and legislation to require police officers to carry personal liability insur-
ance to cover costs of brutality or death claims.

3. Proposals and legislation to decrease and re-direct policing and prison funds to
other social goods.

4, Proposals and legislation for (elected) independent civilian police accountability
boards with power to investigate, discipline, fire police officers and administrators.
5. Proposals and legislation to disarm the police.

6. Proposals to simplify the process of dissolving existing police departments.

7. Proposals and legislation for data transparency (stops, arrests, budgeting, weap-
ons, etc...)

Ultimately, the only way that we will address oppressive policing is to abolish the po-
lice. Therefore all of the ‘reforms’ that focus on strengthening the police or “morphing”
policing into something more invisible but still as deadly should be opposed
 

 

I want you and everyone else to remain safe, Remember, this
pandemic is not over.

I want to stress that we must take this time to think about what
we want instead of policing. People are upset, in a rage, and
tearing shit up. But as abolitionists, we know that the real work
is about building things up. Anyone can tear shit up. But how
many can build something worthwhile and lasting? That is our
task. We need to engage with folks and start talking about what
we want instead of the cops. How can we make the police obso-
lete? What do we need to build in order to make them obsolete?

We need to go into communities and talk about what we, mean-
ing the people in these communities, want. We should listen,
The government isn't. We understand the pain and frustration.
But we have to make this moment a movement. That means we
have to work to build connections. Real safety is achieved
through good relations, Relationships, good ones, make people
feel safe, Let's work to build relationships with people. Let's
listen and discover what is already there that we can build from,
Let's get connected, Let's encourage people to connect with
each other, to show up for one another, Let's talk about how to
solve contlict and address harms without the cops. Some of that
is already happening. Let's tind out what those things are and
amplify them.

This is our task. We must build. That's what abolition is about: a
presence, not just an absence.
Always,

Stevie
@agitateorganize