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 June 27th, Sophia Rashid, a Muslim woman, took her four-year old daughter out to eat in Stillwater, a town on the St Croix River about 20 miles east of St. Paul. Stillwater has two main industries: bars & entertainment - and the Stillwater state prison. The prison, where human beings are forced to work at twelve cents an hour and face punishing medical neglect during the pandemic, is a breeding ground for both multi-racial solidarity against state-sponsored slavery - and segregation and white supremacy. That night downtown Stillwater would be made unsafe by bikers with ties to a white supremacist prison gang - sparking a strong reaction from Stillwater workers and residents.
The horrendous murder of George Floyd - and the powerful Uprising that followed, inspired action from some Twin Cities workers. On June 16th, workers at the Seward Co-op Grocery store on East Franklin Ave staged a brief walk-out in the parking lot to demand Justice for George Floyd and the abolition of the police department.
During the opening months of the COVID 19 pandemic, frontline healthcare workers at St Paul's United Hospital (part of the Allina Health system) took measures to protect themselves, their families and the public they serve. These efforts were vehemently opposed by management. Among other positions they took, management insisted workers use their personal scrubs instead of the scrubs readily available at the hospital and used by doctors, physician assistants and some nurses.
