Know your rights zine— reminder that this is a zine, meant to be printed out and folded into a small booklet, so some pages will be upside down on your screen!
As the summer born in flames nears its end in Minneapolis, the counterinsurgency playbook plays out much as expected. As symbolic concessions are granted all over, the material reality of racist police violence driven by propertied interests continues.
Conversations during and after the Uprising led to people forming up a Whittier copwatch. In that copwatch, connections were made which helped workers get in touch with union organizers and tenants to revive tenant organizing committees and more.
On New Year's Eve, our community gathered for a noise demonstration in downtown Minneapolis in support of prison abolition and in solidarity with incarcerated folks. Officers swarmed the scene, abruptly making violent arrests without dispersal orders. It is an abuse of power to disperse a protest without issuing such an order. Instead of ticketing or releasing folks - which is the norm - our friends and relatives were held over the holiday weekend under probable cause charges, which historically has been used by police to give extra time to justify otherwise unlawful arrests that violate everyone’s first amendment rights to protest.
Copwatch is a form of direct action, in which members of a community organize to observe and record police interaction as a means of holding police accountable for misconduct, as well as advocating for people’s legal rights, particularly those who are more vulnerable to police repression due to their race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or housing status.
On May 26th, the people of Minneapolis rose up against the lynching of a 46-year old unemployed Black worker, George Floyd, by the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) in broad daylight. Masses of people, mainly young, mainly poor, and mainly people of color took to the streets. They surrounded and battled the Third Precinct, looted capitalist enterprise, and lit fires that were seen around the world.
The role of police in society is clear— to protect the rich and powerful and preserve the status quo. This is why Black police chiefs, training programs, and civilian oversight have never made a real difference: the underlying purpose of the police is still the same. When you know the history of the police in the United States, from the Slave Patrols to the deputized thugs who harassed and intimidated the immigrant working-class, to today’s riot police and assassins— it all starts to makes sense. The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) is not on our side and never could be. We should focus on building the capacity of working-class communities to resist the police and defend our neighborhoods, not tweak the existing repressive apparatus.
"The fight against racism is a human and universal cause that affects us all.” These are the words of artist Aziz Asmar, who along with his friend Anas Hamdoun painted a tribute to George Floyd on a destroyed building in Binnish, Syria.
