GATA NEGRA
#1 ISSUE - FEB. 2021
WHY A.C.A.B?
fr e iss e ue
Editorial Direct Action is everything Mutual AID is love All cops are bastards Prisions must be abolished Borders are fake Any person is illegal & A World based on cooperation, equality and respecting the planet is possible.
THIS SOCIETY OF FREE PEOPLE, THIS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS IS ANARCHY.
The Collective
Emily Chiller-Kok (USA) / Ruth Kinna (UK) / Louise Rosealma (USA) / Rachel Radick (USA) / Natascha de los Ángeles (USA) / Astrid Gnosis (Spain) / Dave Downes (UK) / Vipera Magna (Rusia) / Miguel Soriano (Spain) / Daniel Treviño (Spain) / Sonia Muñoz (Spain) / Micaela Maisa (Argentina) / Amar Cura (Colombia) / José Sbarra (Spain) / Sonia Tarazona (Spain).
V
Emily Chiller-Kok W
e’re often told, in the face of any kind of violence, to go to the police. If a woman leaves an abusive partner and is attacked, the press asks “why didn’t she go to the police?” But then there’s a paradox that every working class woman has also heard and seen-- the cops don’t do a damn thing.
Police are only able to make people disappear, or to introduce the threat of death into already tense situations. We’re so often stifled by what already is, that it steals our ability to imagine what could be different, to give ourselves permission to think “unrealistically”.
Most of the time they make everything worse. Stories about women calling the police for help only to be attacked or arrested filter into our collective pool of knowledge, and we’re left to navigate hostility and violence both from the people closest to us and from the people who are supposed to protect us. Despite this, violence against women is often cited as the reason why police can’t be abolished, why police should be given more money, because piling more violence onto violence is somehow supposed to make 1+1 equal 3.
We’re focused on survival, both surviving the daily struggle to stay housed and fed, and surviving an often hostile world where we’re blamed if we trust and blamed if we don’t, but another world is possible.
The creative solutions that women have found to this problem worldwide are more often than not hidden for the sake of safety, or just ignored because they put authorities in a bad light. But as protests against police brutality and calls to abolish the police have risen, these projects are an increasingly important glimpse into alternatives to the deadly and unreliable police system we currently live under. Community intervention and defense projects and women’s solidarity and aid groups have shown great success in actually addressing the root causes of violence-poverty, a lack of mental health care, and the lack of communal connections and support.
A world without police, we are told, is unrealistic and unsafe. But we are already not safe. Realism has brought us here, where police murder with impunity, where the sexual violence that police routinely commit, especially against transwomen and women of color goes unremarked so often that it’s more of a surprise when an officer faces consequences than when one does not. Our daily survival is quickly becoming unrealistic under the pressures of policing and police violence, and we can no longer live only asking for what those in power are willing to give us. The answers to our struggles have never been in the hands of leaders, because it doesn’t serve them for us to want more than just survival. When we begin to want to live, when we demand to be allowed to live, we are rejecting the entire idea of being policed.
Y
Rachel Radick OF PHILLY ANARCHISTS
I
n America we have a plague of fascist cops. Police departments are flooded with racists and nazi sympathizers. The history of America is deeply rooted in racism, it’s as American as apple pie. sadly. The police represent and protect this A.C.A.B. has been pulled apart and overused by neoliberals and radical leftists alike. Spurted out like a TV slogan. It sounds redundant now. A.C.A.B. doesn’t mean that there are no good cops.Though at times, that part is debatable. It’s a way to tell people not to trust cops, not to put your faith in them protecting you. There’s plenty of people out there who have no idea what they’re talking about and glom onto anything they think makes them edgy? Regurgitated angst and rage are very trendy right now.
Our state’s interests happen to fall towards the rich white elite and therefore, the laws only exist to protect them. Name one inherently good police force. They all serve capitalism. If you’re violently enforcing and defending an inherently bad system as all cops do, you cannot be morally good, you’re morally bad.
I THINK AN AWFUL LOT OF PEOPLE ARE FLOATING AROUND HUMMING WITH COGNITIVE DISSONANCE. THEY WERE TAUGHT GROWING UP THAT COPS ARE THEIR FRIENDS. DEPENDING ON WHERE THEY GREW UP, THEY LIKELY NEVER EVEN INTERACTED WITH POLICE EXCEPT IN A SNITCH CAPACITY, AND THAT KIND OF THING NETS YOU PRAISE AND REWARDS.
The same way that “ Black Lives Matter” doesn’t mean no one else’s life matters other than Black people. Only racists make the argument that BLM equates some kind of “Black supremacy” out of people protesting that black people deserve to not be murdered by cops for existing.
It makes a certain amount of sense that suburbanites thinking they deserve what they get for “breaking the law” and older folks trying to use government to quell a changing generation.
A singular cop may be morally good but that same cop defends a system that is inherently bad so the cop is a bastard. Good cops are still putting on riot gear to violently combat protesters who are exercising their rights.
Individuals all have the capacity for good and therefore we must have the capacity for compassion, but when that individual is part of an organization that is the enemy of the people, our compassion will become a tactic they’ll use against us.
LAW IS NOTHING MORE THAN THE WAY IT’S CARRIED OUT. THE POINT OF LAW IS NEVER TO PROTECT THE PEOPLE BUT IT’S TO PROTECT STATE INTERESTS AND THE STATUS QUO.
I am saying individual cops are bad people. Good people speak up against injustice. Both BLM and ACAB are meant to grab you and shake you, to say that:
“RIGHT NOW THIS NEEDS YOUR ATTENTION BECAUSE THIS IS AN ISSUE YOU HAVE BEEN IGNORING” As a people, as citizens of any country, we should and must protect each other, and we must care. I realize that is asking a lot from some, but this the way we will bring change. The system is unjust, it’s cruel and unfair. Life is also all of these things. But you have a choice to stand up to it and fight up against it, or just lay down and let it just get worse. We have a duty as human beings to stand in front of others and protect them and their rights, the same way people stood in front of our rights to defend us. Cowards are neutral and I would rather be dead than be a coward.
The kind of person that dreams of becoming a police officer varies into three obvious categories, People that want to take on crime or “bad guys” like a “hero” mentality. Or people that aren’t that bright perhaps and this job is the best they can do. and people that want to use this power to their advantage, to feel bigger and better than others, to exploit and or appeal to women, and to feel important. They need a gun to get it up. There is no shortage of bad cops. It’s harder to find a cop with ethics than a cop that will steal drugs and money during a raid, or blackmail a young woman into a compromising and demeaning sexual situation during a routine traffic stop. Or the cops that murder people because they fucking can and they will get away with it. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for black men
WHITE COPS, BLACK COPS, ASIAN COPS, FEMALE COPS, AND MALE COPS ALIKE. DOESN’T MAKE A FUCK OF A DIFFERENCE. Black people have always known that cops abuse their power and just in recent years, social media and recording these moments has become the bane of existence for all corruption. There is no hiding abuse of power without going viral as long as someone has the good sense to film it. But the cop will still walk, he will still likely keep his shit job or go home with a full pension. So this is why we say A.C.A.B. The basic betrayal of the police towards the public is disheartening. Where they are in this position to make the world better, and I realize their job is dangerous. The police represent different things as we age. When we are kids, we believe police are there to protect us from bad people. Then as we grow, we start to see one fucked up thing after another. and we start to think about the types of people that become police, we think about their training, their mental, psychological and emotional stability, and education as a whole.
Do you know what other job is dangerous? Sex work, tree work, oil field work, fighting fires. The burden of being poor is having to sell your soul and put yourself in danger, Or take an awful job you can to feed your family. A police officer has a whole other reason for this choice of work. Police are the enemy of the people because they choose to be.
Louise Rosealma Y
Red Eye Collective www.tinylittlespitfire.com
A
s the President told white supremacist militia members who’ve been unofficially deputized by law enforcement in many places to “stand by” on the National stage, Portland Police Bureau’s rapid response team were deputized as federal Marshal’s. Deadly no knock raids and street murders by the domestic terrorists we call cops continue to be State sanctioned. This is just one of the innumerable examples of how far decades of conservative tyranny and neo-liberal reform have gotten us.
How much longer will Americans choose to stay on this merry-goround? There is no longer any room for peace policing, liberalism, symbolism, or identity political games to reorganize a more inclusive and submissive hierarchy for the oligarchs. There is no rebuilding a capitalist oligarchy, there is only dismantling it within our minds and our communities. This country has never for a second been a democracy, any evidence of that is an illusion devoid of the bigger picture. Fascism has always existed in the US, but some of us have experienced it for longer and it’s only because the seated president has made it undeniable that the majority have opened their eyes to their own oppression. Some still deny even as fascists storm the Capital in an attempted coup.
This country’s relatively short history is one of minorities and the working class’ endless fight for equality in an inherently inequitable system, conceding for crumbs while the cops keep them from taking the whole loaf. It is impossible under a capitalist oligarchy to achieve equality for all, and until we decide to kick liberal reformism of the economy and the policing systems that protect it, we will see our demise by the end of the century. Americans are tired of bread crumbs, and the eyes of our demands will be as big as our stomachs.
In the end our inalienable rights are not determined and granted by a governing body, they are within all of us and granted by ourselves. No longer will we rely on our masters for protection, no one is coming to save us. We, the working class, have the power to end this, save ourselves, if we will it. The endless class war goes on, and so we rage on.
FOR INQUIRIES OR COLLABS WITH GATA NEGRA PLEASE CONTACT US: GATANEGRA.ZINE@GMAIL.COM
Y “THEY GOT ME TRAPPED / CAN BARELY WALK THE CITY STREETS / WITHOUT A COP HARASSING ME, SEARCHING ME / THEN ASKING MY IDENTITY / HANDS UP, THROW ME UP AGAINST THE WALL / DIDN’T DO A THING AT ALL”
Ruth Kinna
Y
Professor of political philosophy at Loughborough Universit in the Department of Politics, History and International Relations
I
n Living My Life, Emma Goldman mentions a meeting in 1920 with Maria Spiridonova, a member of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Spiridinova was a veteran of anti-Tsarist struggle. She came to international attention after she published an account of the vicious beatings and rape she suffered at the hands of the police during her detention. The resulting outcry persuaded the Russian government to commute her death sentence. The two women met in Russia after Goldman’s deportation from America. Although she had played an active part in the Revolution, Spiridinova was again on the wrong side of the law, this time as a critic of the Bolsheviks. Trotsky judged her too dangerous to leave Russia, so she was forced to live in internal exile until 1937, when Stalin’s ascendancy made her position even more precarious. Thrown back into prison, she was subjected to further tortures. These included the resumption of the routine intimate searches that had traumatised her in 1906. She wrote: “Spiridinova’s story ended horribly in 1941. She was shot by NKVD agents along with 156 others in the Medvedev Woods” … there were days when I was searched ten times. They would search me before and after I went to the bathroom, to and from a walk, and before and after an interrogation. They never found anything on me, and of course that is not why they searched. The groping practiced by one of the matrons would rouse me to fury, to escape it I would yell at the top of my lungs, resist, and try to break free. They would then cover my mouth with one sweaty hand and with the other push against the matron who would search me and go through my underwear.
Portraits of Maria Spiridonova & Emma Goldman
Goldman’s description of her as the living embodiment of the spirit of revolt rightly highlights her extraordinary determination and courage. Yet it also risks misrepresenting the punishment she received as being equally extraordinary. In fact, sexual violence is a facet of everyday policing everywhere, not one reserved for special ‘outlaws’, deemed enemies of the state. The English Collective of Prostitutes reports that police habitually use the threat of arrest to blackmail sex workers into having sex with them. Amnesty International documents similar practices in Brazil and Tunisia, where LGBTI people are also routinely extorted.
I was pinned to the floor of a cell by three female officers. I had my hands cuffed behind my back and my legs tied together while they cut off my clothes with scissors. They ripped out my earrings, grabbed by breasts roughly while turning me over, and even touched me between my legs, apparently looking for genital piercings. During the search, I could hear them talking with male officers who were standing by the open door.
The organisation reports that rape by police is a common method of punishment inflicted on women and girls in Nigeria. A UK 2012 Independent Police Complaints Commission Report into the abuse of police power concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that predatory sexual behaviour was commonplace. Yet it acknowledged that accurate data did not exist, and that number of reported cases was an unreliable guide to the actual instances of police grooming and exploitation. Between 2012-2018 nearly 1,500 complaints of sexual misconduct, including sexual harassment, exploitation of crime victims and child abuse, were filed against police, special constables and community support officers in England and Wales.
What about intimate searches? In the UK, the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 lays down strict rules on searches. Still, a 2018 report on the unannounced inspection of Metropolitan Police custody suites found that the number of strip searches was ‘high’, that they involved children and a disproportionately high percentage of non-white detainees. The authors concluded that the searches were neither clearly warranted nor properly justified. This was also the experience of a female student who was arrested in 2018 after attempting to give legal advice to a black teenager during a stop and search:
Sexual violence is not just a weapon of war. It’s ingrained in policing just as racism is institutionalised in law enforcement.
YYY USEFUL CONTACT FOR LEGAL REPRESENTATION GREENANDBLACKCROSS. ORG/GUIDES/THE-POSTCHARGE-LEGAL-PROCESS/1LEGAL-REPRESENTATION/ Green & Black Cross (GBC) is an independent grassroots project. We are set up in the spirit of mutual aid and solidarity to support autonomous social struggles within the UK.
Vipera Magna Y
Y
esterday Russia witnessed possibly the most militant demonstrations and protests in the last decade. Never before have i seen such clashes of protesters with the police. The cops were pelted with snow, kicked, maced, chased - a taste of their own medicine, ultimately. I waited for this for months. I was livid at the treatment of antifascist political prisoners- the tortures, the framings, the fabricated evidence. I was angrier still when protesters that came to the FSB headquarters at Lubyanka were arrested. I was absolutely furious when the cops took people in at the protests against the Constitutional amendments, when they closed off the city like the night fell upon a house, windows shuttered. I watched the news and felt sympathy and anger for those beaten and maimed, for I could imagine it happening to *me*.
The russian police persecute the russian working class communities every single day, especially in smaller towns. They plant drugs on people, neglect abused women, discard reports of rape and sexual assault. The FSB have tortured and framed several Russian antifascists and anarchists in the recent years, in several high-profile cases, like the Network case, Novoye Velichie, and Azat Miftakhov just last week. At
ANARCHIST OF MOSCOW
yesterday’s protests the demonstrators were a mile more violent than the cops the liberals are scrambling to make it out like it’s not so, but they really were! The Russians can do a revolution when we come upon an inspiration - we are like a “bear, slow to wake, but unmatched when drawn to full height”.
I am still scared of the cops and the repressions that will surely follow. But why am I also scared of the protesters? What could it be? Was it the disturbing spectacle of someone getting pulled down from a lamppost for holding an anti-Navalniy sign? It never even said anything about Putin - only against Navalniy. So why was that man dragged down so violently purely for disagreeing with the crowd? I, too, despise Navalniy, I’m a fucking anarchist. I despise Putin equally. And yet, if i took to these streets with a message reminding people that Navalniy, apart from being a massive twat, is completely unable to get rid of fundamental inequalities within a statist society - they would rip me down too, would they not?
If only i had like-minded people by my side, fighting the law. We’d never let any harm come to each other - we would protect ourselves from even the most earnest of Navalniy’s supporters. Any unrest is an opportunity for us, anarchists, to get out there and cause ruckus. But the anarchist movement in moscow is practically dead, and the most prominent Russian anarchists are either in prison or abroad if they were lucky to escape the clutches of the intelligence services, quick enough to cross the Polish or Belarussian borders... who ARE these people, on the streets? They are my compatriots, molded together with me by the same repressions, the same stifling oh human rights and freedoms but why am I more afraid of them now than I am of the fucking cops? Why, every
time when i reach out my hand to them, does it feel like a part of my brain has run ahead in front of me, put together some chain of thought just beyond the border of my conscious mind, peeped around the corner, and whispered to me, “don’t go, don’t go, for I hear it too!”? Perhaps one day the anarchist movement in moscow will come to life again. Even if Navalniy and his twat hamsters only ever achieve a change of the Tsar, surely the new government will quickly release all political prisoners, as they promise to, and craft its own doom this way. In any case, I cant deny that the development of affairs is a pleasant and interesting show. It’s nice to watch.
“THE PEOPLE IN POWER WILL NOT DISAPPEAR VOLUNTARILY, GIVING FLOWERS TO THE COPS JUST ISN’T GOING TO WORK. THIS THINKING IS FOSTERED BY THE ESTABLISHMENT; THEY LIKE NOTHING BETTER THAN LOVE AND NONVIOLENCE. THE ONLY WAY I LIKE TO SEE COPS GIVEN FLOWERS IS IN A FLOWER POT FROM A HIGH WINDOW.”
Y
Amar Cura MASSACRE EN BOGOTÁ
* Masacre: ntentional and simultaneous homicide of 3 or more defenseless people, which occurred in the same circumstances of time, manner and place.
In memory of Javier Ordoñez, Lorwuan Estiwen Mendoza Aya, Anthony Gabriel Estrada Espinoza, Cristhian Andrés Hurtado Menece, Marcela Zuñiga, Jaider Alexander Fonseca Castillo, Julieth Ramírez Meza, Germán Smyth Puentes, Julián Mauricio González, Cristian Camilo Hernández Yara, Andrés Felipe Rodríguez, Fredy Alexander Mahecha, Angie Paola Baquero Rojas y Eidier Jesús Arias.
W
hen you have grown up in a country plunged in pain, death and terror, when the first thing you read every day when you wake up are news about massacres, social leaders- murders, assassination of former FARC guerrilla who demobilized betting on a failed peace process; but at the same time you live in a capital city where, although you are a political subject with a high level of consciousness about these situations that produce rejection and permanent pain on you, you still feel a certain sense of “consolation” observing these situations from
a distance and you have that unworthy feeling of relief for one who watches a war through the screen of an electronic device from a position of comfort. Until a day comes when your convenience is shaken by something that happens a few blocks from your house, that day in which an event occurs and it detonates all the fury and rage that many of us carry inside and that has been accumulated over years observing so many abuses, injustice and impunity. On the night of September 8th, 2020, the homicidal violence of the Colombian National Police claimed a new victim: Javier Ordoñez, a 42-year-old man whose crime was going out to get some beers with his friends in times of pandemic and whose punishment was the death penalty caused by electric shocks with a taser gun applied on public roads, and later a brutal beating carried out inside a police station (Comando de Atención Inmediata, CAI) with the participation of 7 members of the police. And no, here the murders of unarmed civilians committed by the National Police are not a novelty, according to the study “Bolillo, Dios y Patria” by the NGO Temblores, between 2017 and 2019, 289 homicides were committed by the public force in Colombia, 23 of them happened in Bogota. However, this was not another case that was simply added to the long list. Probably because this occurred in the midst of a situation of tension, disagreement and anguish produced not only by the COVID-19 quarantine but also by the weak management of it and the lack of social guarantees in a country where, according to the OCHA report, “Overview of Humanitarian Needs in Colombia”, in 2020 8.5 million people had unsatisfied basic needs, of which around 34% of people have severe needs and another 13% are in dire need. In addition to the dignified rage, the accumulated resentment of the citizens against the abuse and systematic criminal practices of the Police, the hunger and hopelessness in the streets that are very evident in the gazes of those who live here, this was combined by the media coverage and the class approach that from very early in the morning of September 9th reported on the murder of “a lawyer” (although Javier Ordoñez still had to present a test to obtain his law degree). This sum of events detonated an unprecedented social upheaval in the Capital District. The power of social networks was a booster, a call to protest against this murder was quickly issued in front of the police station
where Javier Ordoñez was murdered, and there were other calls to replicate the protest actions in front of the police stations in several districts of Bogota. This is how hundreds of people (mostly young people), responding to a spontaneous call, first arrived at the police station where the crime had occurred, but also thousands of people gathered at other points and protests began to develop in front of other police stations and in an extraordinary way and life a dream of seeing a burning police station was coming true, 40 of these buildings were attacked and at least 12 were incinerated. The brutal response of the National Police was immediate, in different parts of the city police operations and the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (ESMAD) were developed. These armies of death were deployed throughout the city to recover by fire and sword the police stations that had been taken by the protesters, and before the eyes of all and also in front of the cameras of protesters and independent media that were covering these events, the police, the ESMAD and some Armed civilians (most likely undercover police officers who often appear at protests to further raise spirits and detonate the violence that justifies an even more violent response), opened fire on protesters and passersby. The result: 13 people killed by firearms, including 3 women and a minor. In addition, the District Oversight reported 75 civilians injured by firearms, 43 by knife and 187 more for other circumstances, including blows with blunt objects, falls and run over in the middle of the disorder.
However, it is outrageous to observe how today, almost 5 months after these events occurred, the impunity that governs in Colombia is blatant, no high command of the Police or the National Government was held responsible for the events, nor has it been dismissed, while those of us who repudiate these facts and everything that the police as an institution represents, we keep asking ourselves:
¿WHO GAVE THE ORDER?, ¿Why were firearms fired simultaneously in different parts of the city?, ¿Will they continue being so cynical to say openly that these are isolated events, that those who commit these acts are only a few “bad apples” but the institution does not have a deep structural problem?, ¿Will our demands for a structural and urgent reform of the National Police been heard?
On September 10th and 11th, protests against police brutality continued, although with less intensity. In addition to the 13 people killed and the more than 300 injured, during the 3 days of protests; 213 people were arrested and 3 women were sexually abused simultaneously inside a Police Station in downtown and one more woman was also victim of sexual violence by members of the police in another station also in downtown.
The massacre, the excessive use of force, the sexual assaults and the multiple acts of police brutality, evidence an authoritarian exercise of power based on oppression, terror and intimidation; but this time on a scale never seen before in Bogota and that was recorded in multiple videos that have circulated on social networks and independent media.
T
he Anarchist Film Group★ (AFG) is a developing platform for anarchist, radical and related film-works - both historic and contemporary, documentary, TV, feature-film, short clips and domestic/amateur footage. The group is growing rapidly and feels like a fairly healthy environment - please invite others who might be interested in the subject and those who are also interested in developing an outward-looking anarchist movement. www.facebook.com/groups/anarchistfilmgroup/
Y
AUTOMATONS OF THE RULING CLASS
Historically and globally, the police have colluded with and enforced fascism – during the Second World War for example, it was the police in France, Poland, The Channel Islands, Norway and Holland that did the dirty-work of the Nazis and Hitler had plans drawn up to work with the British police to keep order in the wake of any invasion. It’s a mind-set that is a prerequisite of the job – automatons of the ruling class. Cops have always defended oppressive regimes (Spain/Chile,/South Africa/etc), stood in protection of the ruling classes and corporations of every country and always stand with the bosses when workers strike. They are the unquestioning overseers of the state, who undertake the dirty work of military dictatorships and the powerful. Increasingly militarised, these ‘public servants’ will use chemical weapons, total surveillance techniques, tasers, guns and violence with little or no provocation and do exactly as their politician masters tell them. And yet, our TV and cinema screens are filled with depictions of heroic cop after heroic cop. We’ve got reactionary heroic cops and liberal heroic cops; white heroic cops and black heroic cops; heroic cops who will work outside the system when the situation calls for it and never face a problem because they are always right, and heroic cops who never have to work against the system because the system itself is always right.
Y
We live in a world in which police are responding to peaceful protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets. We also live in a world in which the heroic police officer is one of our culture’s default protagonists. Here’s a few of my favourites involving bent cops, murderous cops, or better still, no cops at all. SPRINGFIELD COPS ARE ON THE TAKE, BUT WHAT DO EXPECT FOR THE MONEY WE MAKE? WHETHER IN A CAR OR ON A HORSE, WE DON’T MIND USING EXCESSIVE FORCE! BAD COPS, BAD COPS,
Films Y
CHERÁN: THE TOWN THAT SAID NO TO THE CARTELS, NO TO THE POLITICIANS AND NO TO THE POLICE. Footage comes from RadioIndiginera and Cherán Community TV, 26mins. LA HAINE. 1995. 98mins. Director: Mathieu Kassovitz. 4 hours in the lives of three young men in the French suburbs the day after a violent riot. VIVIR LA UTOPIA (LIVING UTOPIA) 1997. 96mins. Director, Juan Gamero. For a brief, beautiful moment in 1936, the working class were in the saddle and the bosses, the gangsters, the landlords, the cops, the fascists and the government, could go fuck themselves. ARMY OF CRIME 2009. 139mins. Director: Robert Guédiguian The poet Missak Manouchian leads a mixed bag of youngsters and immigrants in a clandestine battle against the Nazi occupation and the Vichy collaborationist police.
TOUCH OF EVIL 1958. 95mins. Director, Orson WellesA stark, perverse story of murder, kidnapping, and police corruption in a Mexican border town. THE HURRICANE 1999 146mins Director, Norman Jewison The story of Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, a boxer wrongly framedup by the cops and imprisoned for murder.
SERPICO 1973 130mins Director Sidney Lumet. A New York cop named Frank Serpico blows the whistle on rampant corruption in the force only to have his ‘comrades’ turn against him. COPS. 1922. 18mins. Director, Buster Keaton & Edward F. Kline. Buster runs rings round the LAPD. CASABLANCA. 1942. 102mins. Director, Michael Curtiz. Anti-fascist cafe owner Rick, struggles to decide whether or not to help his former lover and her fugitive husband escape the Nazis. Corrupt cops stand in the way.
RAMPART 2011 108mins Director, Oren Moverman Dave Brown is a misogynistic, racist, brutally violent and a womanizer cop, although he defends himself against these accusations as he says that his hate MODERN TIMES is equal opportunity. 1936. 87mins. Chaplin’s treatise on alienation where he MALCOLM IN mistakenly ends up at the head of THE MIDDLE. a demonstration and promptly gets Season 2 Episode 16. beaten up and arrested. Lois is fitted-up by a cop who expects kick-backs at her store and SALVADOR starts a war. 2006. 134mins. Manuel Huarga.
Anarchist bank-robber Salvador Puig Antich, whose 1974 framing by the police and subsequent execution under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
Miguel Soriano
Wd COP LOVE
W
hen I was asked to write a column on the theme of ACAB in cinema, the first thing I thought was, what exactly did that acronym refer to? Police brutality? It seemed vague to me to think in that single dimension, in a unidirectional reading. The truth is that ACAB goes beyond bastard policemen: ACAB is the abuse of authority, ACAB is the militarization of the police forces, ACAB is the abuse of women for a masculinization of order, ACAB is the racialization of laws, ACAB is the disintegration of the institution of policing, its reduction or even abolition. And beyond an old countercultural skin anthem, it is the reminder of the war in the cities. After all this talk, that would surely be better explained elsewhere. What I propose here is not so much to explore an ACAB cinema or a guided tour of the baddest cops in the movies, but to take a journey through those moments that cinema has given us to reflect on this abuse of power or the organization of the Apollonian vision of feeling. And where is the other in all this? Where is the one who suffers? In one of the most beautiful films ever made, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc by Carl Theodor Dreyer, we witness vexation, humiliation, torture, and the outright abuse of power. We have never seen such a concrete expression of pain in cinema since.
As in the myth of Medusa, the protagonist is subjected to the patriarchal forces of order for having taken a path that intersects with that of beauty and temptation, even after having overcome the punishment and abandonment of God the Father. . Jeanne is left alone before the violent mass of the terrifying medieval clergymen, who finally wrest away even her passion. This is the relationship of the authority figure with the world. This fantastic love story—and isn’t cinema an infinite tale of the impossible romance? The Police Love Story. Tracing a diary, more than a map, because love propagates itself in time, not in space, the first figure outlined early in the morning is that of the officer of Bad Lieutenant by Abel Ferrara. As if the city were his, the bastard walks his path. Nobody can stop him; New York is his game board, on which he does not stop betting, and he has no respect for anything or anyone.
In the first five minutes, we see the transformation of Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde, AKA Mr. Abuse of Power and Humiliation, leading to his ritual of nudity, a beautiful dance between drugs and gambling, in which one of the characters, to whom he owes money for bets, reveals the danger of imposing his own subjective rules: “This ain’t no fucking joke anymore, seriously.” To which the protagonist responds with the best line of the film: «None can kill me, Im blessed. Im fucking catholic.» This answer outshines the main plot: the case of a nun who has been raped by orphans that are now delinquents. The pursuit of the fucking catholic policeman, in the search and capture of these monsters, is like a whirlwind of drunkenness, frustration, and double standards. Along the “hero’s” journey, there is still time to abuse some girls returning from a party. Not for nothing does the lieutenant end his journey in the same way as those he is chasing. These same, these Others, are our protagonists in the eternal race down the abyss of drugs and crime, managing to translate the equation in the most radical fashion. A policeman pointing his pistol at the residents of the neighborhood of Vallecas shouting, “Don’t make us lose our patience!” Followed by a parody of the made-inHollywood portrayal of the police to a guitar rhythm in La Estanquera de Vallecas by Eloy de la Iglesia. “Hey, there are only two of us!” they warn from within. But the moment in which the Quinqui cinema emerges is when a policeman, standing in front of a Santiago Carrillo poster with a whistle in his mouth gives the starting signal for the riot police to attack the curious residents of the neighborhood gathered in front of the tobacco shop. “There are balls, little balls for the boys and the girls, those are stronger than wood.”
Stronger than wood is the metal. And beyond love and the human condition is the future: Male transhumanism or the coming of God the Father. The end of the dichotomy between the balance and coherence of the apollonian patriarchy in the face of the unbridled pleasure of the Dionysian femininity, the black hole that devours everything. Isn’t this just another face of prejudice? The subjugating goddess who augurs fascist terror, of which Jesús González Requena speaks when he contrasts Metropolis with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that which has, in fact, a new rival: The überpolizei RoboCop, the perfect machine that puts an end to the fascination of the 20th century, the absolute masculine order. The future belongs to the police-clergyman who does not stop welding his pistol in front of the residents of a run-down neighborhood, protecting the order of the ruined columns of gender and race that rise higher than ever, in an impossible balance, on each side, to our left and to our right, holding up the darkest and most terrifying void that we only ever saw in the eyes of Maria Falconetti. But in this movie, who is the protagonist? Gracias a Merry y Raúl por iluminarme
Daniel Trevino I
n 2002 Sam Raimi premiered his adaptation of Stan Lee’s Spiderman comic to the big screen. This film was the pinnacle of decades of American comic culture and inaugurated the superhero movie boom that we are still immersed in today, which is one of Hollywood’s gold mines. Beginning at the start of the 20th century, superheroes became popular as comic book characters who fought against that abstraction called “evil”. Without a doubt, they were one of the escape valves of a post-industrial society whose new moral challenges needed to be politicized or simplified; and the comic was a fantastic tool (and not the only one) to achieve the latter. All those powers that were altruistically used to help people, those flashy costumes and the atmosphere that surrounded the superheroes had to match the gigantic enemy they fought: crime. Without this enemy, superheroes would have no meaning as such. Who would Spiderman be without his Green Goblin or Professor Octopus? What job would Daredevil have in a crime-free society? What would the daily life of any superhero be like in a world without crime? The paradox of the world of superheroes is that the true protagonist of their stories are not them, but crime. And its entire narrative fetishizes crime to justify its existence, because no matter who the superhero it is, the common denominator is always the lurking crime in any of its forms that generates the need for his or her existence. Back to reality, the essence of the police is not understood without this consensus, without this fatal need to fight crime. In the same way as superheroes, the police have normalized themselves by magnifying the myth of crime in society.
Crime is that which, for no reason that we can understand, is constantly on the lookout and wants to cause us irreversible damage. Its antidote: the police. And with this formula, society has normalized them.
Just like in the recent episode of the “squatter media epidemic” (aimed at establishing a consensus among the population regarding the urgency of more restrictive housing laws, with the hidden aim of speeding up evictions), the police always have a blank check to act in pursuit of a supposed common good. Propaganda is always at the service of this idea, of the social need for the police. Films, television series and video games stereotype and normalize the figure of the policeman, far from questioning his existence.
From a very young age, we are exposed to their inclusion in society as just another job, when their job is unlike any other. We will all agree that any toy or animated series for children that sets out to imitate reality features a police character. Likewise, they are always paired with a criminal character, one so nasty that their portrayal results in a parody. How can one represent something as complex as “crime”? Chicken stealing hats, scars, tattoos.
The stereotypical Snake from the Simpsons is meant to trivialize what exists behind crime: class realities, racial realities, unjust laws ... worlds whose political aspects would dismantle the idea of “crime” and that a Playmobil criminal figurine is not worried about contextualizing. Likewise, there is no Playmobil pack for enacting the scene of an eviction or police brutality. The intention of the toys is not to give perspective on the criminalization of the working class, much less to question the police; rather, it is to normalize security forces. The origins of the police force are anchored in modern states and the need of the rich and landowners to protect their property. The police are the extension of the private armies of the feudal lords, who kept possible offenses against their authority at bay. The essence of the police is purely the protection of power and that is its function. Power, like many other things, has become more complex and, unlike in feudal times, it no longer appears with such ostentation and clarity. It is diluted in companies, banks ... intangible concepts that serve as masks for the people behind them and their interests. The way that those feudal lords had to convince the common people to agree to remain under the yoke of their private armies was to evoke in them the fear of crime as an immediate threat. This is how the “protect and serve” mantra of the police forces works, but who protects us from them? On the horizon, people are working on building utopias (which are utopias not because they are impossible, but because of their defiance of the established order) that pose the possibility of abolishing the police. Such projects are especially on the rise after the unrest of the BLM movement in the US last year, although they revive precepts and ideas almost as old as the police forces themselves. By replacing the police with social services, psychological care and reintegration teams, they set out to create a
future to which a sane society would aspire. To get to that point, we have to break the vicious circle that normalizes the police: their glorification, the fetishization of crime and the cult of power. Break the fatal need for a hero. Dismantle power in all its forms. Generate reintegration programs for members of the security forces and provide them with decent jobs to return them to the working class to which they belong. The mature society to which we aspire does not need the police.
Y
Jose Sbarra
F
ilosofía del fanzin” o el ejercicio de preguntarnos colectivamente; y no es este mecanismo, el de cuestionarnos algo entre varixs; ¿lo que nos lleva a organizarnos? La autopublicacion como fisura -sin grietas no entra la luz-como vehículo de ideas e imágenes con fuerza de taladro. El fanzin filosofa, pregunta, y nos cuestiona hasta a nosotrxs mismos para no acomodarnos, sino que nos agita a crear. Todo está por hacer. Filosofía de la fisura: las herramientas ya estuvieron demasiado tiempo encerradas entre los muros de la academia y los altos precios editoriales. Filosofía como la capacidad de preguntarnos sobre lo común, sobre lo
normal. Preguntas que no responden, pero agudizan la desobediencia que puebla el pecho de toda persona. Filosofía que brota en una plaza, en un fanzin. La filosofía fisura dialoga entonces, quiere entramar, conectar, abrazar. La autopublicación como formato de comunicación. ¿Y qué es la policía sino la antesis de la comunicación? La policía no pregunta: dispara, no escucha: rompe puertas, no conecta: encierra. ¿No es la imagen del policía y su brutalidad la encarnación de la violencia económica y lo absurdo de las fronteras? ¿No tenemos todxs un policía interno al cual queremos desterrar? El fanzine fisura: la gimnasia del preguntar. Las fisuras amenazan la solidez de lo establecido. Las fisuras se conectan porque tienen en ellas un mundo nuevo donde ya no haya policías. No queremos repetir lo que ha dicho un/a autorx, queremos preguntarnos todo porque nada nos convence, queremos juntarnos, comunicarnos y crear. El fanzin es expresión, furia y belleza, pero también es una excusa para estarnos cerca. ACAB COMO RESULTADO DE ESTAS (Y OTRAS) FISURAS.
“ESPERO QUE SEAS VOS. AUNQUE VEAS ESTE LIBRO EN MANOS DE UN POLICÍA... EL INTRUSO ES ÉL, ESTE LIBRO FUE ESCRITO PARA VOS. PARA QUE LO ENCONTRARAS, PARA QUE LO ROBARAS. PARA QUE SEPAS QUE NO PUEDO DESCIFRAR TU CLAVE, PERO QUE MIENTRAS ESCRIBÍA ESTAS PÁGINAS, ESTABAS EN MÍ Y TE LO PASABAS BIEN.”
WE SPA ARE N TRIASH TLOOOKIN NSLA ENGG FO TOR LISH R IF YOU YOU WANT TO JOIN THE GATA NEGRA COLLECTIVE CONTACT US GATANEGRA.ZINE@GMAIL. COM