BENTON LAWSUIT UPDATE! NEW TACTICS!
what a revolution is it's just this
it's coming out again night after night more of us
than there are of them it's saying no
to every deal remember nothing
belongs to you because nothing
belongs to anyone
- Joshua Clover 1
In the summer of 2020, as the Seattle Police Department terrorized community members in the streets by lobbing explosive cannisters and spraying toxic gases, Dismantle filed a civil suit in federal court asking the courts to remove these misused “community control weapons” from SPD’s arsenal. For over a year, the community’s request for court intervention by way of an injunction stalled in the court’s docket, only to finally be denied in this month. As a result, we have made the decision to dismiss our civil lawsuit.
There is a fundamental divide between the federal court system and community. And as much as we try to strategize our way across the chasm—to bend and stretch the language of what it means to be alive in a hyper-policed world2 so that largely affluent white judges with lifetime judicial appointments will feel moved to take even one small action—we find ourselves again in the same place. Rather than continue to contort ourselves into shapes the federal court system might deem worthy of consideration, at great personal and collective cost, we are choosing to name what is true. The system is working as designed, and that design will never protect us.3 Asking the courts to restrain the police, even in the smallest of ways, is like consulting one head of the Hydra about the violence of the head that sits next to it. What relief could it possibly provide us while resting upon the same neck?
We find and build power in saying what is true. This is not a surrender, but a collective refocusing and redoubling of our efforts. The fight for Black lives, 4 for freedom of protest, 5 and for a world without police violence 6 continues. The fight continues daily while community risks everything and system power holders—like judges—risk nothing. The fight persists despite decades of persecution of Black movements by the federal government.7 It continues in the small actions8 that individuals take every day to build the world we are imagining. We extend our deepest gratitude to everyone who supported us during this process. We invite you to join the fight, ongoing for decades, where you can support and lift up those most impacted doing the work.
We will waste no more time or energy in a system designed to support the status quo and inoculate law enforcement from accountability. Instead, we will join in solidarity with communities leading the way to disrupt power and bring true justice to our world. We choose to “cast our lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world."9
-TALITHA HAZELTON
1 Joshua Clover, Haecceity. Red Epic (Commune Editions, 2015). Available here: https://bit.ly/3tmtsne
2 Mariame Kaba, To Stop Police Violence, We Need Better Questions–and Bigger Demands. Available here: https://bit.ly/2YytAod
3 Racial Capitalism and Prison Abolition Zine. Available here: tiny.cc/zinelibrary
4 The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). Available here: www.m4bl.org
5 Rights of Protesters, ACLU. Available here: https://bit.ly/2WZ05f6
6 Reina Sultan and Micah Herskind, What is Abolition, and Why Do We Need It?. Available here: https://bit.ly/2X5cGwA
7 Struggle For Power: The Ongoing Persecution of Black Movement by the U.S. Government. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). Available here: https://bit.ly/3yUGjy7
8 One Million Experiments. Project Nia & Interrupting Criminalization. Available here: https://bit.ly/3nf7B00
9 Adrienne Rich, Natural Resources. The Dream of a Common Language (Norton, 1978). Available here: https://bit.ly/2X5Y8xk
