Anarchy in Wisconsin!

Here’s what happened that night

A lot of things have happened since George Zimmerman was found not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin. In Milwaukee, the movement for justice for Trayvon has found great resonance among those of us who have been taking the streets against MPD since the release of the video showing Derrick Williams dying in the back of a squad car. The struggle against white supremacy and the police continues in the streets of Milwaukee. I want to take a moment to focus on a particularly intense moment of that struggle. This moment began shortly after the verdict in the Zimmerman case was read.
The verdict became clear around 10:15pm. By 10:30 there were probably 50 people gathered in Garden Park on Locust and Bremen. There was generally a lot of confusion about what would come next. Some had seemingly settled on taking the streets though others wanted to hold a group discussion about what to do next. Both approaches had their own merits and drawbacks. Those who wanted to march realized that the energy and emotion surrounding the verdict was going to peak at some point and that there was no time to waste. However, without enough people, a plan, and with the cops close by, it seemed fair to question the efficacy of such a march. Those who wanted to talk realized that we were surrounded by police in a neighborhood which was generally apathetic. They also seemed far too eager to lay the groundwork for a leftist circus precisely at the moment when we could act most decisively.

About 25 people ended up taking the street and they headed towards North Avenue for reasons unknown. After about 30 minutes they returned with no arrests. By the time they got back, news had gotten out that there was a gathering on the North side of town in a predominantly black neighborhood. About half of the group that had gathered in Garden Park carpooled over to 38th and Hampton. When we arrived, we were greeted by two people from the community who explained their perspective on the situation. Following their lead we set up a roadblock on one side of the street. Each car driving in our direction was stopped, informed of the verdict, and then allowed to proceed. Most of the people stopped by this ad-hoc roadblock were happy to see us there. Chanting and banners brought people from the surrounding residential areas out onto the corner. Most of them were hesitant to enter the road, but cheered us on from the sidewalk. At around quarter till midnight, the first squad car showed up.

Two white, middle-aged officers got out of the lone squad car and calmly asked the crowd to disperse. No one moved so the police returned to their cruiser and called for back-up. The police looked visibly nervous as the crowd doubled in size to 60 people. As the police waited for back-up, more people joined us on the street. After about 20 minutes, a substantial number of police showed up. A dozen cops gathered opposite our growing — and increasingly rowdy — crowd. They ordered us to disperse. The organizers who had originally called for us to come to the area made it clear that there would be future actions and promptly left the intersection. One of the organizers, however, returned to the crosswalk for reasons unknown. It was then that the police made their move and put the organizer in handcuffs. The enraged crowd began to move forward to de-arrest the organizer.

About a half dozen police officers pulled out their pistols and pointed them into the crowd.

After that, the crowd slowly dissipated and the situation returned to normal.

i-39 N

“NEVER FORGET: POLICE MURDERED DEREK WILLIAMS AND COVERED IT UP. A*C*A*B*”

To disrupt the everyday banality of grey concrete and buzzing motors, to show a flash of solidarity to our friends and allies fighting the cops in Milwaukee and Madison, and most of all, to express our grief toward Derek Williams‘ death and sympathy to his loved ones left behind, we woke up extra early to drop this banner over the interstate before early morning rush-hour. We did so to coincide with the  inquest of his killers this week. By chance, there was a minor semi truck accident prior to the banner drop, 200 feet ahead of the bridge, so cars drove past at extraordinarily slow speeds, which means they had plenty of time to read it.

While we know that banners alone could never bring about the fundamental social change needed in order to live in a world without murderous pigs, we hope that they could be used at this time to at least communicate messages to others, and to show our acknowledgement and solidarity to other struggles occuring in the occupied territory of “wisconsin”.  And to let you know that we are watching…

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC) is Wisconsin’s biggest lobbying firm, financed by business and industrial elites to craft the legal policies that govern us and permit the transformation of all existing life to the that of the commodity. They want more clear-cutting and tree farms instead of wild forest, more mines where pristine rivers carve through wetlands and ancient rock formations. They want more factories, more pipelines, and more sprawling concrete highways that connect dispossessed workers to the infrastructure and technology that is turning the planet into a smoldering pit of death. They wish to keep us imprisoned in this world of work, alienated from the land, each other, and the activity that makes up our daily lives.

They have also recently been pushing hard toward further industrial development in the Lake Superior region, specifically, opening the Bad River Watershed (where 40% of Lake Superior’s wetlands are located) and the Penokee Hills up to open-pit iron mining. We understand that this will significantly affect people’s subsistence strategies, particularly the Bad River Ojibwe who are directly downstream from the proposed mining site and rely on the walleye and wild rice that the pristine waters give to them in order to survive.

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Tar Sands Blockade: A Presentation and Discussion of Resistance

Two Wisconsin activists who have spent time in the actions to blockade the Keystone XL Pipeline will be talking about their experiences and the issues that inspire them.

5:00PM, Friday, February 1st

UW-Stevens Point
Dreyfus University Center (Alumni Room)
1015 Reserve St., Stevens Point, 54481

https://www.facebook.com/events/136939603131785/

Protecting the Water

Frank Koehn, a longtime activist from Herbster, Wisconsin, will be here to talk about the proposed taconite mine and protecting the Penokee Hills, the Bad River Watershed and Lake Superior from resource extraction projects that put profit into the hands of corporations while destroying the resources people depend on for survival. 

7PM, Saturday, February 2nd

UW-Stevens Point
Dreyfus University Center (Laird Room)
1015 Reserve Street
Stevens Point, WI 54481

https://www.facebook.com/events/395036663922151/

In Madison, Wisconsin, a crowd of over 200 people gathered outside the City-County Building on Saturday over the shooting death of local musician Paul Heenan by a Madison police officer. Paul Heenan, 30, was shot three times in the chest by Officer Stephen Heimsness after he stumbled into the wrong home (his neighbor’s) while drunk in the early morning hours of Nov. 9th.

Officer Heimsness was cleared of all wrong-doing, following an internal investigation and returned to patrol duty, policing the streets. The results of the investigation were released earlier in the week, finding that Heimsness did not violate department policies on the use of deadly force, sparking the protest outside of the City-County Building.

The main speaker of the rally made many good points about the “investigation” made by the police. For example, he cited the neighbors, who witnessed Paul’s death and have disputed the MPD account of the shooting.

Kevin O’Malley, has gone on record saying, “I remember yelling, ‘He’s a neighbor! He’s a neighbor!'” and his wife, Megan O’Malley (who was the person who initially called 911 thinking it was an attempted burglary) says that Kevin’s screams were loud enough to be heard from inside the house before the pig so ruthlessly unloaded three rounds into Paul.

People in attendance also learned that in 2001 the same pig, Stephen Heimsness, was suspended for 15 days for shooting out the tires of a fleeing car in a parking garage. In 2006, he was involved in an arrest of a bar patron that led to the city of Madison paying a $27,000 settlement because the man was almost beaten to death, leaving his face looking like a bloody, pulpy mess of pepperoni pizza. The Madison Police Department’s internal investigation found that the use of force in that case, including knee strikes and kicks to the face with steel toed boots while his partner held the face-down man’s head up, was “for the most part … reasonable and necessary”.

Now, the speaker at this rally made some excellent points about the various injustices regarding this specific pig, the specific case and the utterly disgusting internal investigation, and for that, I am extremely thankful. His heartfelt response to such horrors was greatly appreciated by everyone in attendance, I am sure.

But his analysis for police violence (policing is good, this is just one bad apple), and his recommendations for how we as a community proceed to work on policing in the future (talk to your local politicians and demand the establishment of an independent review mechanism) were seriously lacking for such a dire situation. In some cases it was just plain silly and missing any sort of historical perspective on what policing is, how and why it came to be an institution, and what greater socioeconomic purpose they serve, as evidenced by his statement, “the police are sworn to not only protect us from each other, but also from ourselves.”

PUUUUUUUUUUKE.

Paul’s murder, and subsequent cover-up by police, shouldn’t really be a surprise. Cops are armed henchman of the state and capital, who enforce the laws and customs that regulate and produce the state’s desired behavior. The institution of policing exists on “our” rulers’ behalf; to order all of the population into this world of work, capitalism, and industrial civilization and whip into shape anyone who falls out of line.

One only has to look at Milwaukee (the most segregated city in the USA and the 4th poorest), where factories LEGALLY spew toxic, industrial waste into Lake Michigan and where multinational financial institutions have skyscrapers arrogantly eating up the skyline while people are literally starving in apartheid-like conditions, to see that the “order” these pigs maintain is really just misery under the despotism of state, capital and civilization.

It’s also not a surprise that brutal, power-hungry pieces of human shit like Officer Stephen Heimsness were attracted to such a position that grants so much power to dominate and coerce.

Being a person who has directly experienced police violence (being handcuffed so tight my hands lost feeling and being punched into the back of my head while cuffed) it was extremely aggravating to hear such whitewashing of pigs in the city I was born and raised in. It was equally as aggravating to see flyers for the event posted up in yuppie shopping areas (State Street and Williamson) but none were to be found in economically depressed neighborhoods like Badger or Allied, where police “misconduct” (can it be any other way?) is a regular occurance. It’s no wonder the crowd was mostly middle class white people who only have a problem with policing when a white man gets shot “by mistake” and it’s no wonder the anger felt by the people in Liberal Madison was being funneled into such dead-end, legislative measures that will never solve the social problems that produce desperate people committing “property crimes” and killer fucking cops to begin with.

If this struggle is to amount to anything meaningful, it will require connecting with communities that experience police tyranny on a regular basis in Madison, and it also might be worthwhile to connect the struggle to the loved ones of people murdered or abused by police in nearby Milwaukee recently, such as Derek Williams (who suffocated to death in the back of a cop car after having his neck broken), Darius Simmons (a 13 year old shot dead by a racist vigilante pig without a badge), James Perry (another man who died in custody from a seizure after the pigs refused to get him medical attention), the woman who was punched multiple times while handcuffed in the back seat of the cop car, etc. This list could go on for pages.

Anyways, the crowd began breaking up while a boring Alder-person from District 6 was giving a speech. A small contingent of rebels, radicals, anarchists, etc, who wanted to articulate a different narrative that didn’t hopelessly beg for change from leaders, or sugarcoat the inherently violent institution of policing, began to assemble near the road. The part black bloc, part scarf-bloc proceeded to march directly into one-way traffic towards the Dane County Jail and Courthouse behind a large black banner reading “Authority Misuse, Stop Police Violence (A) (E)”. Unfortunately, nobody that I know of made material preparations, otherwise some minor costs for killing one of us would have been inflicted upon the Jail and Courthouse. One presumably liberal/moderate attender of the rally said afterwards that “they did not go to be associated with the group of people with scarves over their faces holding the large black banner, looking like a bunch of Islamic extremists”. And that’s what solidarity is to a liberal… “You make us look bad”.

After we marched past the Courthouse, completely blocking traffic and temporarily stopping a city bus, us scarved terrorists marched up the road towards Madison’s yuppie pedestrian shopping district State Street, that also ironically serves as the stomping ground for much of Madison’s homeless population during the day. We screamed anti-police chants like “Madison Police…. Mur-der-ers!”, “Cops in our hood, ain’t no good”, “Who, who can you trust? Not the PO-LICE”, “While you’re shopping, Cops are Copping” and so many others.

The response we got from observers was a refreshing dose of encouragement as opposed to the boring liberal guilt trip of city officials to be found in front of the City-Council building. Cars honked and waved at our banner and gave a thumbs up as we clogged up the very intersection they were attempting to pass through. Other people walking with shopping bags said “Thank you so much for doing this” and a longtime member of the State Street Family (S.S.F. is the name given to our homeless comrades, see: http://www.inside-voices.com/) screamed “That’s Right! That’s Right! That’s Right!” over and over as we passed and shook our hands. We even managed to unintentionally recruit some people to march with us and scream anti-cop chants for a couple of blocks behind the banner.

After we marched across and then directly into traffic on University Avenue (probably the worse place you would want to be driving, let alone walking into traffic, during a Badger’s Basketball game at the Kohl Center 2 blocks away) people began to get tired and started to fade away from the march, so we called it a day.

Some graffiti we passed on foot read “Cops, Pigs, Murderers” and that made us smile to see others in town (presumably) taking back capitalist space to pass messages along. We only saw three police vehicles during the entirety of the march (all of whom kept their distance), and while we weren’t able to get greasy and break some shit or fight the pigs in the street, we managed to create many waves in an extremely public area (the busiest pedestrian area in the city), and once and for all we have at proved that militant marches in Madison ARE indeed possible, and surprisingly welcome. No arrests were made.

We are under no illusions that non-violent marches of 20-30 people in themselves could ever pose a serious challenge to those in power, however sharing a street with comrades (some new!) can hopefully push an alternative narrative and serve as a stepping stone to bigger and bolder actions, that could one day offer a formidable challenge to the reality that we want to transform.

-an anarchist

————-

Paul Heenan: http://www.wisconsinwatch.org/2013/01/06/police-account-of-shooting-disp…

Derek Williams: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSYbj6f1EfM

Darius Simmons: http://dariussimmons.org/

James Perry: http://fox6now.com/2012/10/30/fox6-investigators-video-surfaces-of-anoth…

[from @news:  http://anarchistnews.org/content/we-shall-never-forget#comment-217028]

Friends.

We attacked two ATMs early this morning in the Fox Valley of Wisconsin, in addition to dropping two banners in two different cities. Our reason for choosing ATMs is because we don’t like them.

The banners read,

“We Will Not Forget Derek Williams. /A.C.A.B.”

and

“Release the PNW Grand Jury Resistors. Stay Strong Comrades.”

The reason for this action could be one of a thousand. But, we did this specifically to express our rage against the Milwaukee PD murdering Derek Williams and the kidnapping of our PNW comrades. Certain things in our minds cannot be forgiven and lines must be drawn.

Lets keep it coming.

Keep your hoods up.
-some pissed off people

Reposted from anarchistnews.org (http://anarchistnews.org/content/friends-never-let-them-dominate-you)

On the morning of september 19th we smashed out 1 window of the US Bank in downtown milwaukee to express a love and admiration we have for a recently arrested comrade
Sorry it could not be more
What we share for each other is nothing next to our hatred for order

With respect
An anti-social social club

 From Anarchist News dot org (http://anarchistnews.org/content/dear-northwest)

“On the night of of august second we dismantled 3 police cruisers and 1 paddy wagon. Then attacked the NYPD (pizza shop) changing the signs to say suicide our cops a reference to a milwaukee hardcore band from the past. On August 3rd we smashed the windows out of the obama campaign center. Leaving where is yr god on the wall.

expect more.

Fuck it, just do it. Milwaukee”

A new project called Milwaukee Prisoner Support has been started in Milwaukee with the goal of providing material support to loved ones and comrades in prisons. The Milwaukee Prisoner Support blog is also providing access to online resources such as news about Wisconsin prisons and prisoners, know your rights information, and a link to the Milwaukee county inmate search.

Milwaukee Prisoner Support is planning its first letter writing day for August 6 at 7 pm.