Z-anon-sensei Speaks #107
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“When in the course of human events…” Thomas Jefferson
Z-anon-sensei says they try to maintain a wide variety of sources of information, an extensive network of connections that can provide the best intelligence available from as many angles as possible. Messages both physical and ethereal– which like disappearing ink sometimes vanish as fast as they can be deciphered– stream into Z-anon-sensei’s collection systems day and night. Information is vital, but information is not understanding. Sorting, verifying, confirming, editing, and assessing the relevance and strategic utility of each can be a long process, and happens in several different departments of Z-anon-sensei’s totality. But, in this case, Z-anon-sensei has received a communique from deep inside the Defund the Police Movement, and is sharing it prior to those usual steps. Always a little risky, going against SOP. But several cyphers within the text as well as within the delivery mechanisms suggest a connection to ^risingtide—whether symbolic or actual is unknown. Z-anon-sensei is simply passing it along to you [Which means me, who is passing it to you, which means you. ed.] without further comment.
First Draft of a Declaration on Defunding the Police
When major social changes are demanded by the people of a city or region, it is important that the reasons for and necessity of those changes be explained to the broader world, so that their demands can be understood and supported by that world.
These things are obvious: Police forces are created to protect the rights of the people and to secure the safety of the communities which create them. They are paid by the people’s taxes, and they should work only in the service of the people. Therefore police serve at the pleasure of the people, and the people have the right to disband them whenever those police forces no longer serve the people’s needs. The people pay the police for a service, so the people have the right at any time to stop paying for a service that is no longer fulfilling its function, and find for themselves new means of securing their safety.
When the police claim powers that haven’t been given to them by the people, when the police ignore the orders of their own governmental authorities, when the police brutalize and murder the people they are supposed to serve, and become a danger to the cities they are hired to protect, then it is the right, it is the duty of the people to abolish those police forces, and to create new safeguards for the security and prosperity of their communities.
Such is the current situation in many of America’s cities. The police have become an occupying power, and a power unto themselves, holding themselves above the civilian authority of Mayor and Governor and City Council, and standing against, rather than for, the people they are paid to serve. Racism, corruption, and abuse are rampant within police departments across the country.
Some things, when they are broken, can be repaired. And the patient suffering of the people in trying to fix the police has been long indeed. Processes of reform have been tried, time and again, and have failed, time and again. Yet the natural human fear of change, the desire to hold onto to past practices long established, leads many to ask, again, for patience and for slow reform.
But when a long history of abuse and excess force is added to nightly in our cities, put on display for the world to witness, when unnamed officers in unmarked vehicles snatch citizens from their own streets in the dark of night, when the legitimate grievances of the people are met with tear gas and rubber bullets, when all efforts at reform and moderation are rejected by the police forces, when they ignore the direct orders of government, when they treat the people they are supposed to serve as enemy combatants, turning the weapons of war against the very people who have paid for those weapons, then the only option remaining is to abolish the police as currently formulated, removing all funding from them and directing that funding toward building new and better systems for protecting the rights of the people.
This is not the time, any longer, for moderate reform nor for ignoring the crisis in front of us. Now is the moment for bold action that, if it seems disruptive in the present, will lead in time to far more just, secure, comfortable, and stable communities for us all. Defunding the police, and using that money to support systems and processes that actually do provide for the needs of the people is the only way to move forward toward peace and justice in our communities.
And the people demand that their elected officials do so immediately.
Defund the Police.
Z-anon-sensei says Nuff said.
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