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.
I have learned through living in homeless camps that the true war on fascism and the state starts with feeding and sheltering the people you were taught to fear and learning to love those who have suffered the most.
The backlash from white Minneapolis progressives to radical demands/actions like the encampments, the George Floyd Autonomous Zone, and abolishing the police has taught me a lot about how a lack of real solidarity makes it easy to abandon radical ideas when comfort, control, and security are threatened.
The most clear lesson I learned (or re-learned) this summer is that if we wait for policy change or permission from capitalists and politicians we will never end houselessness. On the other hand, If we continue to assert our human right to housing through occupations and direct actions we can make sure every person in our region has a warm home.
