At about 5pm on Saturday, I was talking with a friend at Occupy Philly when another friend ran up to us. “We need people at 8th and Race!” I grabbed my bike and we rode down there, inspired to hear of the Occupy Philly folks who had marched in solidarity with the movements in our town and others against police violence in our communities. Oct. 22 is a national day of action. When we got to the Roundhouse (Philly’s police headquarters, if you’ve been spared knowing of it), we saw about a dozen people sitting in a circle in the street. We joined the others standing, photographing, and offering help, and we became part of an impromptu speak-out. I recorded and typed up some of the testimony so that everyone at home wouldn’t miss out on why this is happening. All of the paragraphs below in quotation marks were the words of Occupy Philly participants on 8th Street.
Victims and Witnesses
“Last night in South Philly, two of our fellow occupiers were enjoying their Friday night. The police decided to break up a party and just start beating the shit out of people for no reason. They could have peacefully asked them to leave, but that’s just not as much fun, I guess. So, one of our fellow occupiers was thrown against the car and beaten with a baton when he tried to get on his bike. Then the police officers proceeded to call him a faggot while sticking the baton between his legs.”
“I was coming home late from the bar one night this summer on Walton Avenue in West Philly and heard something and turned and looked and saw a group of like, eight to ten cops kicking the shit out of this guy on the ground who clearly posed no threat to them. And I was scared. And looking back, I regret that I didn’t intervene or do something. But I’m glad that I get to share it at least with this group of people and bear witness. It’s super painful, and it’s something that happens constantly in this town. If you live around here, you’re going to see it happen. It has to stop. There’s no need for these people who have arms, guns, and cars, and helicopters, and prisons – they don’t need to beat the fuck out of people.”
“A disproportionate number of police brutality victims are not just people of color but are members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. I myself as a transgender person, male to female, am afraid of the day when I will get beaten up by Philadelphia police.”
“My name is Derek. Me and my best friend Brandon were on South Street, we were just walking to the Starbucks, and he got brutally hit in the head by a policeman. In public. All I did was put my cigarette into the street. The cop was right there, but nowhere near me. He told me to pick it the fuck up. Why the fuck do I have to pick up a fucking cigarette from the ground? He said he would beat me the fuck up if I didn’t do it.”
“Last summer, I was walking down South Street at night, on a Saturday night. I saw tons of police around. There were some young people, maybe like a hundred young people, they were just in the street, kind of having fun, nobody was getting hurt. It was actually kind of fun to be around, and I’m 37. It was a lot of young, black teenagers, or maybe 20-year-olds. And then I saw the police coming up the street on horses and motorcycles. They were also on the sidewalk with the horses and motorcycles. And they cleared the street. And the cops on the horses were chasing them – to “Move! Move!” – and they’re on the sidewalk. It was terrifying. And I can speak to the racism involved in that. I’m a 37-year-old white woman, and I was yelling, “You fucking fascists!” But they did not even look at me. I was fine, I could go wherever I wanted. But if I was a young, black person, I would not have been – they couldn’t even get away. They couldn’t even walk peaceably down a side street. They were being corralled up to Broad Street, forcibly. And it was deeply humiliating to them, because they were actually just not doing anything, except being out. So I just want to say about the flash mob thing, it’s complicated, but that was really fucked up.”
“The homeless, they get beaten up every day…. We’re not here to cause trouble with the police. But we’re here just letting them know we’re sick and tired of the ass-whippings. We don’t want our asses kicked anymore – we just want respect.”
The Big Picture: Police and Prisons
“I want to bring up the corrupt judge who was over-sentencing juveniles to fill quotas in prisons. It was in Pennsylvania. I want to say, we might have the conversation, ‘Oh, they’re good people, there’s only some bad cops,’ but you know what? The system of punitive justice is inherently corrupt. We’re talking about the entire punitive system. It’s about filling quotas. It’s about cheap or free labor in prisons. It’s about feeding the capitalist society with cheap to free labor. This is an inherently corrupt system. This is what we’re talking about – not individual police officers.”
“Has anyone read the 13th Amendment? Slavery shall not exist in the United States, EXCEPT where someone was duly convicted of a crime. Slavery is legal if you’re in prison – they can make you work without pay.”
“Since we have a nice little group here, I think we should start a dialogue, brainstorming things we can do every day to make change happen.”
“Does anyone have a smartphone, where they could pull up police brutality statistics from a reliable source?”
“Anyone know who Fred Hampton was? Who knows what happened to him? He was drugged the night before and shot in his sleep. The police stormed in his house and riddled the entire place with bullets and said that it was a violent gunfight, when it was two people in there. If you ever see the photographs of that, when they were dragging his body out of there, every single one of them is smiling ear to ear. For what? Because he started a breakfast for kids program. Because he was talking about racial issues, because he was talking about black people’s rights to be treated like decent human beings.”
“I want to remind everyone of something that’s not happening in Pennsylvania. But there was a program started by the federal government called Fast and Furious. They were sending automatic weapons into Mexico because they wanted to track the weapons, supposedly, to the drug cartels. So when we think about where are these weapons and drugs coming from that are coming into our communities, we have to understand that the government is putting these weapons into our communities. It’s been happening since the 70s. So they create poverty, they create the problem, and then they lock people up for profit…. I understand that there are maybe some good police officers who want to do their jobs, and don’t want to hurt people, but you have to understand that you are part of a really sick and twisted system. If you know a cop who is breaking the law, it’s your responsibility as a police officer to turn them in. Don’t turn a blind eye to it and have some kind of bullshit solidarity.”
“Almost all the heroin comes from Afghanistan. Who controls the airspace in Afghanistan?”
“My husband is a criminologist and I’ve asked him to send me some stats. I’ll read them as they come in. One for now: One in every 100 people in this country are in prison.”
But What Can We Do about It?
“A problem many precincts across this country have is that they police themselves. When you have people policing themselves, there is way too much room for error, and way too much room for, ‘Hey buddy, we just had drinks at the bar last night, turn a blind eye.’ We need outside agencies – not the FBI, and not the Department of Justice – we need the community to actually do something.”
“Community Review Board.”
“We need WikiLeaks to get all over the police system.”
“There’s a Rate My Professor – we should start a Rate My Police District.”
“We need a Philadelphia Copwatch.”
“Who here doesn't know what a copwatch is? Copwatching is you using your legal right as a citizen to observe public servants. Police officers are public servants. There was a memorandum sent out about two weeks ago from Ramsey, reminding the police force and the public that it is legal for citizens to videotape and record the police. This memorandum came out because two weeks prior to that, there were multiple instances in West and North Philly where police brutality was going on, people got their phones out and started watching the police brutality, and they were arrested, brutalized, and their phones were shattered. That’s illegal. Police brutality should be videotaped and spread wide. Copwatching, legal observing, is completely within your rights…. Nine times out of ten, interactions that I or my friends or the people that I work with – who are a very stigmatized population, they’re people in recovery – they get beat up by cops every single day. They get their IDs taken. They get roughed up and pushed up against the walls of the clinics they go to, because they’re in recovery, and people tell them that they probably have works on them, or that they’re probably stealing… Copwatch is a national organization that was started in Oakland, California in 1981. It is an amazing group of people to be a part of. Everyone should know how to Copwatch effectively.”
“Three out of four people who use drugs are white. Three out of four people in prison for drugs are black.”
“Shame!”
Spotting Infiltrators, Trusting Each Other
“Who knows about COINTELPRO? So, COINTELPRO stood for Counter-Intelligence Program. They developed it during the Civil Rights movement to infiltrate social movements in the 60s, 70s and 80s.”
“People, infiltrators amongst you, intentionally starting shit amongst you and your brothers and sisters. People coming into city hall, people sitting here, around. People saying things in your ear, and whispering things, and trying to incite you to do things against what you’re trying to be here for. People who come in from the police force, from the FBI, from the CIA, to intentionally disrupt peaceful, public movements. We have had undercover cops at Occupy Philly every day since October 6th. And they intentionally try to pit you against each other. They intentionally try to incite paranoia, hyper-vigilance, they spread rumors and lies so that you won’t trust each other. This is a job – this is an actual, outlined job. You can look it up on Wikipedia. These are outlined guidelines for how to break up social movements.”
“We should be really careful when we hear stories about other ones of us here at this thing. Like, ‘Anarchists are bad’ or ‘People of color are bad.’ And I really encourage all of us to go up to people and say, ‘Where did you hear that, and how do you know what you’re talking about?’ face to face. I’d love to brainstorm ideas about like, if we don’t have police, what would we do instead? The safety here has been really cool, because people have figured out ways to do things to make us feel safe without making us feel policed. Does that make sense? I was talking to some folks who were saying they were afraid to ride public transit because people get in fights and they feel scared and wish there was more police, but police don’t stop fights. So how would we deal with things when – for me, it’s like, learning conflict resolution skills or de-escalation skills, or learning to talk to each other better. Which we’re not taught to do. I just think it’s cool to brainstorm ideas of what we would want to have happen instead.”
“There are a lot of people here who have said, ‘If the police aren’t here, then we’re not safe.’ And that’s a totally natural thing to think, because that’s how some communities are raised. The police protect you…. Unless you step out of line, or unless you come from a specific group of people…. Why is it that people feel that they are not safe when the police aren’t around, when there are hundreds and thousands of murders and rapes and break-ins that happen on a daily basis, and the police don’t stop those things, because they’re off trying to find people who smoke pot, who want to hang out in the streets together after 10 o’clock at night. That’s where their priorities lie. So talking to people about why they have this false sense of security attached to the police force is really important.”
“Stat report: There are 6,000 reported police misconducts every year, for a half a million cops in the United States. Since 2009, there have been 11 officers arrested for misconduct.”
There's Gotta Be a Better Way
“We’ve been talking about resolving it amongst the people. I think one thing you can definitely do is to encourage the different schools – I teach. Encourage conflict resolution to be taught in schools. The young people in urban schools don’t usually trust the police. So I think moving in a direction that will help everybody – and they’re doing this in my school, they’re teaching conflict resolution, so you can end something before it becomes something.”
“If we didn’t have police and prisons, what would we do when things aren’t feeling safe and comfortable? Because things are still not going to feel safe and comfortable all the time. But in ways that are humane and dignified, and egalitarian.”
The Whole World is Watching
As I imagined a world where neighbors and strangers looked out for each other and knew how to mediate conflict, a black man maybe in his 50s rode by on his bicycle and stopped to listen. I told him that people were sitting in to protest police brutality, and he said, “We need more than this!” indicating the small number of people holding the street. He continued, “You’re right about that. That’s all they do, is beat you up all the time. They don’t want to just lock people up, do their job – they want to harass you, beat you up. Then, they keep you in jail for a couple of months, so the scars go away, so they won’t have any evidence. They tear up all the letters so you can’t have a way people can find out.”
For more about the sit-in outside the Roundhouse, read October 22 Sit-in against Police Brutality: "It's Our Reality; Fuck Police Brutality", a detailed blog post by Cindy Milstein, and check out these videos: October 22nd march against police brutality
