Security Culture by Matt Riggen Trio
I was participating in an action once, and I happened to catch a whiff of something. I turn around, and one of my co-conspirators is taking a hit of the loudest weed I have ever experienced in person as we’re literally right about to take part in some serious civil disobedience in the middle of broad daylight.
As many members of my extended family can attest, this would be directly opposed to the idea of ‘one crime at a time’—don’t get busted for running a red light when you have illegal items on your person, for example. This idea is adjacent to something I stumbled into later in life (developed by marginalized peoples and more studied activists) called “safety culture”—how do you stay able to perform actions that will lead to your liberation while the entire structure of the law and its enforcement is set up to stop you?
These are not new ideas: the cover of this record is an engraving of the Rachel Rebellion, where rural Welsh farmers all dressed up like the biblical character Rachel as they destroyed tollhouses and symbols of oppressive taxation. Nowadays, the places to find these ideas come out of BIPOC communities in the US, and out of extant tactics employed by autonomist movements from the Soviet era.
I’m lucky enough to have picked up bits and pieces where I can, but a lot of my friends have not, and that’s really worrisome given that we are in the very beginning of a revolution whose explicit goal is to defund or abolish the police as we know them. Believe it or not, individual officers are taking this quite personally, and there is the footage to prove that they are willing to take their hurt feelings and use them to physically brutalize you. I would rather that not happen to us if we can help it—and there are steps you can take to keep the police less on top of you while still doing the right thing.
These tune titles are starter prompts for you to think about how to be a safer activist. Do you have a plan when you go to an action? Do you use communication that secure enough that the contents of your conversations can’t be subpoenaed and used against you in court? Do you know how to act and how to dress to keep a bad situation from getting worse? All of these questions should lead you to more in-depth and substantive conversations with more experienced activists from more marginalized communities.
If you get caught, they will attempt to make an example out of you. The J20 protestors at Trump’s inauguration were initially stuck with charges that would have amounted to ~70 years in prison. The Chicago Police Department murdered Fred Hampton to make a point.
Don’t get caught.
--Matt Riggen, 6/19/2020
Tracklist
Credits
Matt Riggen: bass clarinet, upright bass, drumset, compositions
