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Season 2 episode 15 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we interview Aviah. A sneaky extra episode after the season closer! It took us a while to get back together.
Aviah is a lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, and is a community organiser the rest of the time. She is involved in the East End branch of Sisters Uncut, a national direct-action collective fighting cuts to domestic violence services as well as state violence. She is also involved in Hackney Copwatch, London Renters Union and the Kill the Bill Coalition, a national movement resisting the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill.
“Effectively, if you can organise enough people to [know their rights and intervene] in a coordinated way, then you can actually withdraw consent from policing altogether”
– Aviah
Show notes, links
- Netpol: the network for police monitoring
- Newham Monitoring Project, which shut down in 2016 after running for 36 years
- United Families and Friends Campaign, a coalition of people affected by deaths in state custody.
- There are Copwatch groups in Hackney, Bristol, Manchester, Lambeth, Liverpool, Southwark, Haringey, and Cardiff.
- the Anti-Raids Network, community resistance to immigration raids
To find out about Copwatch, if you’re considering getting involved: either DM an existing group (accounts listed above) or email [email protected]!
We now have a Patreon! Please help keep the podcast going, at patreon.com/resistrenew. If not, there’s always the classic ways to support: like, share, and subscribe!
Transcript
SAMI:
Hello everybody and welcome to this sneaky extra episode of The Resist and Renew Podcast, where we are interviewing Aviah. Do you want to say hi?
AVIAH:
Hi.
SAMI:
Seamless. So Aviah is a lecturer, at Birkbeck, which is part of the University of London, and also does a lot of community organizing, and she’s involved in the East End branch of Sisters Uncut, which is one branch of a national organization that’s like a direct action collective fighting cuts to domestic violence services, and other forms of state violence, and Aviah is also involved in local branches of CopWatch so Hackney CopWatch and London Renters Union, and is also involved Kill the Bill coalition – a national movement resisting the Policing Crime and Sentencing Bill that is currently going through the parliamentary organs, as we record this in early March, 2022.
SAMI:
So first things first.. Aviah what can you say about the political context that you are organizing in?
AVIAH:
The current political context is probably the most intense political context I’ve ever organized in. It’s been a very intense year. And, yeah, there’s, there’s a sort of ongoing political crisis, particularly for the Metropolitan Police, that we, you know, at Sisters Uncut and also the Kill the Bill coalition and cop watch groups have been organizing to exploit. If that doesn’t sound too Machiavellian, maybe I don’t mind if it sounds too Machiavellian, I do want to destroy the cops, that’s fine.
AVIAH:
But yeah, I guess that kind of that emerged out of, you know, I mean Sisters Uncut have been organizing around policing and the impact of policing, particularly around gendered violence, for like a number of years. And, you know, there’s the occupation of Holloway prison, organizing around the death of Sarah Read a few years ago in Holloway prison. And, and, yeah, highlighting the, you know, spending years organizing highlighting the dangers of what we call, like many sort of black feminists call carceral feminism and the kind of feminism that invest in the police and prisons, as a sort of remedy for gendered violence and that actually you know we’ve been organizing around that for years to kind of highlight how dangerous and how effectively, it ends up punishing the survivors it claims to be supporting.
AVIAH:
And it was in that context of years of sort of organizing around that that situation emerged around the disappearance, and murder of Sarah Everard. And, and, yeah, I mean, you know, she was quite a relatively unusual situation that happened, and of, you know, a targeted kidnapping. In full view, you know, on the streets doesn’t happen very often. It’s not usually the way, you know, women are targeted for gendered violence is quite rare to sort of for strangers to sort of abduct someone and kill them, and that being said, you as it emerged at the person who had done that was the serving Metropolitan Police Officer. And later, and as it emerged that he had used all of the state apparatus that was given to him in order to carry that out and actually arrested, kidnapped her in front of passers by. That in itself created a huge huge huge situation political situation for the Metropolitan Police.
AVIAH:
In the early days after her disappearance, you know, there was a video that was announced by Reclaim the Streets and, which they started as a response to the fact that the police were telling women in Lamberth to sort of stay at home when when Sarah Everard had gone missing and the person who was responsible for her disappearance was still at that point on launch at large and unknown. And, you know, they were telling women to stay at home and reclaim the streets decided to have this vigil as a response to that. What they interpreted as police misogyny as making it you know women’s responsibility to essentially curfew themselves as their protection and not actually be part of public life, essentially, and you know, the Metropolitan Police did everything within the within their power to stop reclaim the streets from going ahead with their vigil, and they went down the sort of legalistic route to try and to try and gain the this legal right to to do that because it was during lockdown and the police were interpreting the lockdown rules as basically banning protest in any kind of assembly.
AVIAH:
And, and, you know, they went to the High Court, and all of this and eventually they actually because the police were still refusing to facilitate this as legal protest or legal vigil reclaim the streets, stepped down stepped out of the original and kind of tried to cancel the vigil, the last minute on the day of it. And it was highly publicized. A lot of people were planning on going anyway. Sisters Uncut had said this, few days before that we were going to be there and present, and we took the decision to go anyway. And, yeah, it was, it was after that, that, you know, basically, we went. The police initiated a violent crack down. That was very highly publicized by the media, the violence of it, and the context of of that kind of violence was very shocking to a lot of people, a lot of people who might not ordinarily be particularly critical with the police. And, and, and we essentially, you know, made the argument that if people are you know we’ve known for a very long time and been very realistic about the violence of the police we weren’t really, particularly surprised at their violence, we’ve been organizing this for a number of years. And at that point when when so much of this sort of media attention was had pivoted towards this incident, both in terms of Sarah Everard, but also the violence of the police officers at the video and her name. You know, we kind of highlighted that the following week, more powers were being proposed to be given to the police. And it was out of that, that, you know, we thought it was important to mobilize against the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts bill.
AVIAH:
And, Yeah. Over the last year, we’ve kind of seen the political crisis for policing essentially, only grow, and the movement for the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts bill or Kill the Bill has also sort of grown and matured and yeah so now we’re in a situation, you know, sort of a year later, where, you know, you know, more than 50% of Londoners don’t trust the Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick has now finally stood down. And, yeah, CopWatch groups have sprung up across the country but across the capital as well as a means of resisting police powers, the powers they already use but also the powers proposed in the, in the, in the bill. And so, Yeah, it’s been it’s been a wild year. And, and yeah that’s that’s the context and community organizing in.
SAMI:
Thanks for that that’s really useful and, and it feels like. Because you described it as like a, like a like a crisis for policing, not just the Met police but probably a little bit more broadly as well, like, what do you feel like it is as to why that’s happening like now specifically. Like obviously you mentioned some of the reasons around, specifically the Sarah Everar vigil that ended up getting highly repressed and generated a lot of backlash for the Met from people who normally are quite pro the Met. Yeah. And, but you also mentioned, like there’s been a long history of other kinds of organizing and campaigning around like police violence and state violence so like, do you feel like there were other reasons around like the now, specifically as to like, why this feels like more exploitable now? Like one thing that comes to my mind is obviously like there’s been a lot more focus in the last few years around like groups talking about like abolition and things like that after like some of the like Black Lives Matter uprisings and things like that, like, what do you do you feel like there are other like things that have led to this point, that feel worth mentioning.
AVIAH:
Yes. I mean, the interesting thing is that so myself, and another comrade from Sisters and CopWatch are currently writing a book about abolitionist politics for the British context. And when we started writing that book was, well, the first sort of like you know proposal was being put together like just before the pandemic hit. And that was very much like kind of like, all we need to make an argument as to why abolition should be taken up by the left in Britain. And now it’s like a completely different story. And, a lot has happened in the last two years, and we’re now, we’re now in the midst of our own abolitionist movement that is a response to the particular situation in Britain is not kind of a borrowed politics from from the US. And I’m kind of yeah what led to that I actually do think, you know, part of it is is this growing kind of awareness of abolition is politics from US context. But also, you know, there’s a growing authoritarianism, and a growing problem of policing and prisons in the British context, which is like, you know, it is becoming whatever part of the left that you’re organizing in, it’s becoming increasingly clear that you you can’t really ignore policing. Policing is becoming or has become the way in which like capital mediates itself. And, and, you know, it’s, it’s something that we’re constantly having to confront whether or not you know you’re, go into a climate protest, or you’re doing a rent strike, you’re doing an eviction resistance, you know, whatever it is, there’s just there’s
just so many instances where sort of policing and some kind of coercive state, like presence is is creeping into every area.
AVIAH:
And, and, you know, I think the pandemic really kind of turbocharged that, you know, we saw in 2020 with Black Lives Matter. And, and the kind of state responses to Black Lives Matter. So not only was that, you know, a that was a response to what was happening to George Floyd, or what happened to George Floyd and what was happening in the US. But it was also speaking to people’s experiences, Black people’s experiences here in Britain and the responses to those protests and really highlighted that. And, and also what people were experiencing in terms of racism more broadly. And during the pandemic, you know, Black and brown people being the most likely to die from or get seriously ill with COVID and the kind of conditions that they were living through, and also being extremely heavily policed at a point where no one was no one was about, and yet suddenly all of the policing attention was being focused on black communities. And so yeah, I, you know, that kind of created this.
AVIAH:
And I don’t know, I, you know, I also don’t think that, you know, Sarah Everard’s murder may well not have happened had the pandemic not happened you know when Couzins used his additional COVID powers in the context where people, kind of, you know, had this tacit acceptance that the police are now allowed to come up to you whenever they want. And he kind of exploited that that shift in that culture. And so, yeah, there’s there’s that side of things, but there’s also this growing resistance of that and kind of like questioning of that state power through Black Lives Matter, through what happened at the vigil and through you know this general is general sense of people’s unease about how much power the state should have over our daily lives. And so, you know, the state has kind of use the pandemic to kind of gain more power but I also think it’s it’s rubbing people up in a different way in terms of like people that maybe might not have had this critical like understanding of the state, and are becoming increasingly uneasy with that. And so like there’s all of these different things happening both internationally and nationally that I think kind of, you know, I was led to this.
ALI:
Thank you for that – that just helped me like a bit of a different understanding as to how, how we got to here, cuz I hadn’t necessarily thought about why why the policing, I hadn’t even thought like policing was in a crisis that was like wow police a bad, and people are protesting about it, because that’s what we do. But like, that is like the ideological reasons that some people come to this and like maybe the people that know are part of that but like the wider context which is just feels like there’s a few different streams coming together and that’s causing a bit of a shit show for the police and that’s good broadly, even if it’s like really intense, and for people who
are organizing against it and also the intensity of the way that that repression, state violence, is is more in in the current context So yeah, but it’s helpful for me to just process that
ALI:
In our introduction, we said that you are part of Hackney CopWatch, and that is one of the organizations that’s kind of sprung up in. In this context, could you tell us a bit about what is what is CopWatch what is it, what is it about what’s the trying to do.?
AVIAH:
So, I suppose the legacy of sort of cop watch, organizing, and, in my mind, sort of, you know, owes itself to the kinds of police intervention work and community defense groups that kind of got set up in the 70s, and 80s, particularly in response to that a heavy replaced police repression, in Black communities that sparked the riots in the early 80s in the mid 80s, but also the, you know, police refusal to act on hate crimes, racist murders. And so, out of those conditions and number of different sort of community defense groups please monitoring groups and got set up to do the work of holding the police to account and protecting, protecting community members, from from the police and from from racist violence. And, and, more recently with everything that’s been happening with, you know, the fallout from Sarah Everard and the, you know, constant stories that have come up of, you know, sort of police violence and misogyny. I think one of the things that we wanted to do was kind of link, link that growing interest to the kind of organizing that has been happening for a number of years around policing. And to make the political argument and counter what the Metropolitan Police want to do is kind of make that bad apples argument. And, and, and delink, you know, the death of Sarah Everard from other deaths that happen, or have happened in police custody. I think it’s really important to make the point that Sarah Everard’s death was a death in police custody. Because it stops them from getting away with making this about this one monster. When essentially, you know, Wayne Couzins, is, is not an aberration he is one along a spectrum of people in a very violent institution.
AVIAH:
And, and it’s really important to kind of make the links between that instance, which many people got their attention on and all the other instances of police violence that happened every single day, and all the other deaths in custody that have happened as a result of that police violence, every single day. A) there is that political argument of linking that but B) there’s, you know, what can we do, what can we do about that? You know, a lot of people were really shocked, for instance, when they heard that Sarah Everard was arrested in front of people people saw that and they didn’t intervene. They thought that, you know, this is a police officer. He has every right to do that he’s in the right shoes in the room, she’s probably a criminal. And, and, you know, people like us who’ve been organizing around policing for many years, know that there are things that you can do in a situation when you see the police, interacting with someone in the streets that you, you can intervene in some ways you can do things you can be proactive. We don’t know if that would have made a difference in that instance. But it’s possible. It is possible. And, you know, we think it’s, you know, possible that if someone had intervened in the police stop of Rashan Charles. that maybe, maybe, you know, that wouldn’t have led to his death, we don’t know but it’s possible. And so, you know, on the one hand, you know cop watch is about building up that community understanding and and skills to be able to do something in that situation. But also there’s something more expressly political in that, not just around accountability and just around, knowing your rights, but effectively if you can organize enough people to do that in a coordinated way, then you actually can withdraw consent from policing altogether.
AVIAH:
And we kind of see examples of this with the anti raids movement and the anti raids movement, which, you know, essentially intervenes in immigration enforcement. We saw, you know, what has now become a very spectacular example in Kenmure Street in Glasgow last year. But I think what is important to understand about that and what what kind of CopWatch local community cop watch groups can do around that, is that no matter how sophisticated policing, or immigration enforcement in terms of their like skills, their money their resources and their technologies, fundamentally, it doesn’t work if we don’t consent. And there are still many more of us than there are of them, and they can, no matter how sophisticated that technology is, they can’t account for if hundreds or even thousands come out in the streets to say no. And, and so effectively that is what CopWatch is kind of aiming to do is to kind of intervene in police powers, at the street level and make what, you know, the Police Sentencing Courts. Bill ungovernable. We know it’s going to pass into law but we do have the power to not to essentially stop it being effective and withdrawing our consent to that.
MUSIC BREAK
SAMI:
So I think it’d be great if we can dig into that a little bit more because I think it’s an important narrative and one that I think isn’t necessarily generalized into society that much the expectation that the policing bill will pass, and the plan is to build the structures that will allow us to continue to resist it once it’s passed rather than focusing on parliamentary process, which I guess is like a, that’s a that’s a tactical choice right and so I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about like, what, what does the nuts and bolts of being in a cop watch group look like like what kinds of things do you do, for example, and now you do street stores, because I walked past you on one the other weekend. So like, but I imagine you don’t literally just the stores matter now you probably do other stuff. So like, yeah, could you just like kind of tell the story of what what kind of tactics are you using as cop watch groups and like why those versus other stuff that plausibly groups like you could consider doing. Yeah.
AVIAH:
Yeah, it makes total sense. And so it’s very early doors, and we have a bit of a strategy in place, and a kind of sort of short term medium long term strategy.
SAMI:
I love it.
AVIAH:
And at the moment we, you know, so we’ve been running the sort of know your rights police intervention trainings locally within the Hackney area. And we’ve been also particularly been offering those trainings to groups in the local area. And so, you know, London RentersUnion residents groups and trade union branches. And, you know, we’ve got, you know some plans to do one with some of the delivery drivers you’ve been out with the IWGB. And so, like, essentially get a sort of building up that knowledge and building up like sort of relationship building with different groups across across the across the Borough, but also, essentially identifying strategic places within the borough to focus deeper levels of organizing. And so, you know, for instance, the Pembrey Estate, and it’s quite an interesting place, and that we’re, you know, working around, organizing, around the Pembury Estate that became pretty infamous during the during the 2011 riots. And because, you know, an actual all out fistfight you know have between members of the community and the cops, and they put up a fierce fierce, like, you know, physical resistance of the cops, which then made you know Hackney really infamous for that reason. And it’s all been sort of regenerated now one of the things that’s, you know, quite interesting is that the, we’ve got some intelligence from a resident that Peabody have started putting an extra sort of surcharge for extra policing, to pay for extra police patrols of that estate. And so not only are you paying for policing in your general taxes and your, you know Council Tax you’re also paying an extra surcharge service charge of, you know, your housing association flat for extra patrols. On top of that.
SAMI:
That’s fucked. I don’t have an intelligent response to that.
AVIAH:
Yeah. So, I don’t know if Peabody doing if that’s just a Peabody thing, or if that is a Peabody housing association thing, I don’t know what whether it’s wider than that or not, but you know that’s something that, you know, strategically, you know, we want to focus our efforts around, you know, organizing, you know, that estate, and not only in terms of, you know, should have to pay for that, but also in terms of physically, you know, confronting when those patrols are out, and, and with again withdrawing consent at the physical level, but also the financial level. And so yeah, so that’s kind of like one of the things that we’re kind of trying to focus on. And at the moment we’re also trying to gather more information from other estates about like what is going on on their estates like you know around policing, and like trying to gain a bigger picture. And, and, and you know I mentioned unions earlier and one thing I think is really important because we’re focusing quite a lot at this point on street level sort of stop and search. I think it’s very important that we also broaden out are and, you know, kind of definition of like cop, what that means in cop watch to also mean, you know, turning out for eviction resistance, you know, to also mean turning out for picket lines, you know, picket lines, effective picket lines have been almost been policed out of existence, you know, what picket lines were there most effective when hundreds and thousands of people turned on them, turned up to them and the police brutalize those picket lines until they you know no one turns out to them anymore, and all they’ve made them, you know illegal to it made it illegal to do so we’ve seen the Great Ormond Street security guards have had an injunction taken out of them and told that you know they’re not, you know, they wanted them to have already six people in their pickets and they’re not allowed to have pickets every day and they’re too noisy and it’s like really foreshadowing of what the Police Crime Sentencing and Court Bill will do not only to protest but also to unions and so i i think it’s locally really important that we make the links with renters union groups with trade union branches to not to link what community policing stop and search is with, you know, policing that turns out to evictions the policing that turns out to picket lines, because the police and the state see these things is connected, but we don’t often see them as connected in terms of our political response, and so yeah i think that’s that’s also an important point to make.
SAMI:
I love it. Thank you so much, and just maybe a quick clarifying question, and to make sure that I’ve got a straight my head because obviously, like, and I’m aware that you’re involved and have been involved in like the Kill the Bill coalition which is like a broader coalition and you’re also involved in that cop watch in wearing the hat like a specific local cop watch group Hackney cop watch. So like, just to make sure that I’m clear my head so like kill the bill, correct me if I’m wrong please, that’s like a broad coalition and against specifically this policing crime sentencing and courts bill that’s going through Parliament. Now, and it is involved a lot of different groups that are coming together to like do and coordinate stuff against this bill, and then cop watch I guess is like a thing that’s emerged more recently the coalition’s been around for like a year and a bit, Cop Watch has only been around since, of this specific instance of cop watch groups has been around since like last summer or something I feel.
AVIAH:
Kind of the only the end of last year.
SAMI:
End of the last year. And, and that’s kind of more like practical tactic of like, kill the bill is often like they’ll be big demos and stuff like, that but cop watchers the like you can do this in your
local area like bringing abolition to your local community cut stuff that’s kind of like
AVIAH:
Yeah, yeah. So, you know one thing it’s probably good to see yeah like the kill the bill coalition Sisters Uncut were like one one constituent part of a number of different groups like loads and loads of different groups, part of that coalition. And one of the things that was that kind of has been. Yeah, I think it’s one of those things where you’re like, you don’t really know when you’re in it. Like how this is gonna sort of emerged historically, and, and whether this this or that would have turned out to be good or bad or whatever. But one of the things kind of that emerged was that there were there were differences of politics around a parliamentary strategy and a strategy of making the bill ungovernable in the streets. And you know I don’t mind saying that Sisters Uncut maintain that we you know we thought that the bill was going to pass, that the likelihood would be that some things would be taken off the bill, probably some of the protest stuff. And we thought, actually, that that would probably come more from Priti Patel as a divide and rule kind of thing but actually that was, you know, that did that, it’s fair to say that, you know, the movement did pressure that’s as a win through the Lords, and that is something that perhaps we didn’t anticipate and, but, you know, it’s kind of easy to see how the protest stuff, because there was much bigger and stronger and more movement infrastructure to attack those parts of the bill and that Black communities and Gypsy Roma Traveler communities were the most likely to still, you know, have all of those measures still forced through the bill that was kind of obvious at the beginning and you know, Priti Patel would probably be hoping for at least some of that protest stuff is going to stay on probably still is hoping for that and see how much you can basically get through. And, yeah, we kind of expected that it would, you know the bill would pass, and so therefore if that’s the case, what is our best way of, you know, it is making ungovernable and like yeah so there were different, I wouldn’t say there was really debate, necessarily, but, you know, people ended up, organizing their own strategy, essentially, and, and, you know, Extinction Rebellion, People’s Assembly, Kill the Bill official I think most of their activities have focused around the parliamentary schedule. And, and, you know, I think that it has it has achieved some things I think it’s fair to say that that’s that’s true does, then that has been one through that movement. And, you know, I noticed that you know Extinction Rebellion were I think I’ve taken it down now but they did post out some campaign to ask MPs to accept the bill was it was at this point, so essentially you know they’ve got the bits of the bill that they think that they can get through their strategy, and they don’t want it ping ponging between the Lord’s and, and Parliament and so they’re asking and telling people to ask them to put the bill through, as it is.
AVIAH:
And, you know, I guess we you know we thought that this was somewhat predictable, like that this this kind of politics would end up emerging if you didn’t have a politics of solidarity. And if you don’t have a politics that is kind of, you know, live to this, these kind of divide and rule tactics and and so yeah, like, we kind of, you know, kind of was aware that that was going to happen and kind of like Well, in that case, what we’ve got to do is organize communities to resist the bill, starting with cop watch broadening that out as far as possible. And, and, and yeah now the parliamentary strategies is kind of coming to a natural end, I think that the, you know, and in some ways, not withstanding like the shit from XR that is like, you know, I think I’ve taken down now from a lot of criticism. You know, it remains to be seen whether or not those two kind of those two kinds of strands of strategies, in the end, complemented each other. It’s kind of hard to say when you’re in it whether or not this is like conflictual thing or actually something something that complements it or you know, it might actually be like, you know, we weren’t going to do the parliamentary strategy maybe someone needs to be doing the parliamentary strategies do you know what I mean, and so yeah like I think now, now that that parliamentary
Strategy is coming to an end, I think, you know, it’s, it’s that bit but yeah that kind of hopefully that gives you an understanding of of the different different players and different people and how it how it all delineates but CopWatch essentially kind of came out of well, we’ve got to be organizing to make it on governable What does organizing to make it on governable What does that look like police intervention, you know, let’s do these trainings. Let’s, let’s build up community resistance, essentially.
ALI:
Yeah. And also, I’ve been watching some his face when he said the stuff about the parliamentary divides and stuff, her face was just like, argh – don’t throw each other under the bus to get their fucking accept it, its so bad.
SAMI:
I like to think I like to think that I maintain a healthy pessimism of their intellect, but I’ll be honest, I was shocked. I was shocked by that shocked.
AVIAH
Yeah, I mean it is painful, and I didn’t know this there’s questions there about XR. So, you know, I know that Roger Hallam when he said xR had a lot of, you know, disdain for the rest of the left that you know holds him back and holds you know what he thinks ought to be happening back with all of its political correctness and there’s that going on but also you know there’s a lot of a lot of groups in the left are very reluctant to work with XR for very very good reasons, and when XR have tried to they’ve kind of been a bit lukewarm and so there’s, there’s a bit of a tricky relationship they’re going back and forth. It’s like they don’t foster it a politics of solidarity, maybe we don’t foster a politics that kind of encourages them to shift around that because we we don’t really want to work with them very much like, you know, I won’t say that I wouldn’t work with xR and, you know, I’ve talked to xR members throughout this process, but it is, it’s, it’s finding finding a good working relationship through those those issues is hard.
ALI:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, super complex and super messy and painful when it gets like those values come up against each other and strategies are like, really different. Yeah, yeah. I’m glad I’m glad I wasn’t involved in any of those discussions. On a more positive note, I want to circle back to the idea of mobilizing deliveroo drivers or riders that’s like hacking the gig economy to to get cop watch, mobile, that sounds so good so that. Yeah, that sounds amazing. Yeah, I guess. The, the divide that we’ve been kind of talking about in politics and strategy in the Kill the Bill movement kind of makes a good segue to our question about like how, how do you live the values that you have in cop watch as an organization I guess like internally like what does that look like to. I don’t know anybody abolition internally, or whether whether other values are important to to this like forming organization/ network.
AVIAH:
I mean, so one thing that springs to mind for would be have more sort of like a long range view of this in terms of sisters and cop watch as cop watch has only been around like since like November, and. And I guess one of the things that kind of interested me about this question when I was reflecting on it is like, how much my values have changed. And, you know, Sisters Uncut started in 2014 end of 2014. And I think the, the way in which we interpreted like organizing and living our values, you know, that the beginning or 2014/15/16 for a lot of us has really changed a great deal. And I suppose in a way, cop watch organizing reflects some of those changes. And one of the things that kind of I’m thinking about is, I suppose, there was elements of like, of our organizing that you know we’re really really great got a lot of stuff done. We could organize very quickly. And, but sometimes in the structure of our organizing and maybe the political atmosphere at that time was, you know, could be kind of depoliticizing almost or not really encourage deep deeper political discussion or scrutiny over our politics.
And so, you know, you know I’m kind of thinking of, it’s a bit of a trope either way but like maybe the the more reactionary aspects of what is called identity politics and, kind of, you know, at the time we we consider ourselves to be living our best anti racist selves, or, you know, whatever kind of like form of oppression. You know, we consider that the time to be doing that well. I think a lot of us, not all but a lot of us have reflected on that and feel differently about it and feel differently about how we approach our organizing and, you know, things like, you know, having a sort of policy in which sisters who are not from x experience can’t speak or make policies on y.
And in terms of efficiency, and speed that could be quite quick but it kind of emerged that actually over time it wasn’t, it was not effective. It was not an effective kind of politics name it rose, a lot of problems and like, you know, what happens when people with that same identity don’t agree and don’t have the same politics, you know, doesn’t account for that. And yes, deeper, deeper overtime deeper problems kind of emerged through that and I think maybe, maybe some of that and maybe I think CopWatch organizing, is, is, is a reflection of some of the learnings of that that actually that way of organizing is not is not particularly effective for some revolutionary organizing for want of a better word, isn’t it, and if you want to, you know, meet communities where they’re at and ensure that everyone has a say in in their liberation and a buy in to the liberation, then that kind of politics, you know, it doesn’t really work and so, yeah, I think, you know what it means to kind of live our values in that sense, I think, has has has changed a lot for a lot of us who’ve organizing Sisters and they’re now organizing in cop watch and an hour approaching that very differently in terms of, you know, like I said, meeting people where they’re at and what what accountability looks like when people fuck up. And, you know, or when people behave in ways that is oppressive is very different maybe now, it’s how we would approach it compared, maybe six or seven years ago. And, but yes, it’s, it’s, I guess it’s a different way of thinking about like well how do we how do we approach our values and like what does it look like and what does being anti racist mean and what is it what, not only will just being anti racist mean individually, but what is an anti racist strategy, like how, how do we actually confront the power and, and whittle down the power that, you know, where racism, where capitalism comes from how, what is the strategy to actually confront that and actually, you know, get into a position where we have like more of that power and they have less you know
It’s not just about being individually, better or worse yeah I mean it’s like yeah, I guess our values in that sense of really shifted.
ALI:
Yeah, I guess like with cop watch that’s like, that’s like a new iteration for you to try out new things and take those learnings from from that. And I also want to be like sisters, sisters, having been around since 2014 like a long time for like a social movement thing to last, and that’s cool, and I’m guessing that some of those learnings will have also happened internally and the fact that it has survived means that it didn’t split and break when so many others do after like a year, two years, whatever. So, imagining like those learnings to, which is, which is great. I’m wondering like right at the beginning of this, you started by saying that like this moment is like super intense, because of this policing crisis, and to be organizing in that crisis like, what, what does living the values mean for getting by and care in that intensity.
AVIAH:
I mean on a personal level, I think, you know, I think I’m getting, I’m actually you know personally becoming a bit more interested in a way that I wouldn’t have been in the past, around the like psychosocial kind of, you know, like therapeutic pastoral aspects of organizing, you know, rather than just being like, traditionally the grubby little materialists that I’ve always been and not
SAMI:
I love that description of yourself grubby little materialist
AVIAH:
yeah yeah it’s quite a was my mo for a long time. I think I’ve become a lot more interested in, like, how are organizing is influenced by trauma and how that shows up in our organizing, how our organizing perpetuates that. And, and, yeah, I think I’m becoming a bit more interested in like how we can incorporate some of those questions just a little bit more into, like, you know, owning that for ourselves, creating a little bit more of a culture where it’s just, you know, we can talk about that a little bit more in a meeting space or make a little bit more space for that. And
in terms of owning that for ourselves but also collectively, what, you know, what does it look like to kind of ask the questions around burnout around you know, poor, poor decisions, you know, around really horrible things that might happen on an action that, you know, are traumatic, and the reasons why we turn up in the first place – the traumas that brought us to this organizing in the first place, how that you know all of those kinds of questions. and I’ve become a bit more interested in in terms of like what we can collectively do to like, look after ourselves and each other. And so yeah, I’ve you know I’ve. Yeah, I’ve personally been like kind of thinking about it, experimenting a bit essentially with agendas, with certain kinds of questions like, rather than just doing the basic like functional and try the agenda, like how can we incorporate some of these questions that encourages us to kind of unpack that a little bit along the way of doing the practical stuff. And so yeah that’s that’s one thing that’s kind of on my mind a little bit. I don’t know about other people, I can’t speak to other people well as a personal one.
ALI:
As a facilitation collective, we can be happy to hear that.
SAMI:
Yeah, for sure, that reminds me, I was as part of a group once where I strongly pushed the idea which is maintained for a large portion of the life of the group and I thought, I still think there’s a really good plan, where each meeting was two but it was a strict split between one hour of like more education e learning stuff. And then one hour of like actual meeting. And like we maintain that for the whole life of the group, and I think it was such a good idea, and like I think thinking of those ways of like how can we not just like replicate the same meeting agenda just because it’s what we’ve seen like, I definitely see it a lot. I don’t know if you experienced this but like I see it in groups a lot where people will like basically bring their union meeting agenda to like non union meetings. Yeah, and like the vibe, you can just sit like you can see people do it and like trying to make it fit and it doesn’t really fit because people already, often really hostile to like ‘who is going to chair the meeting, and people will have fuck you there’s no chair this week, and like, how those things can can shift, I think is. It’s always a challenge but a good, a good thing to be plugging away at
AVIAH:
So, yeah, definitely I do yeah definitely had the experience of that and like, yeah, I think, I think, you know, as it’s been a few years, I’m just, I’m kind of just up for a little bit more reflection of like what has worked and what hasn’t worked and like, you know, I think I’m maybe getting that kind of weird kind of, aunty, I’m approaching my mid 30s way of thinking about things that I always used to look at people like Gargi Bhattacharyya and be like, oh wow ‘wise aunty’ and now and now I’m starting to be like, I’m thinking of the last 10 years like what has worked,
And what hasn’t worked and maybe we need to just, you know, take a little moment to just like this and think about it and kind of like, rather than do what I did when I was 21/22 which was just like all guns blazing, don’t sleep, just work, just don’t think about it, just do it.
SAMI:
Yeah. Yeah, I’d have to agree that yeah I think I guess like, it’s like the thing which people say like, if you don’t make the decision to rest and like your body will make the decision for you. It feels like an equivalent one to like if you don’t make the decision to reflect, like the context will eventually make this decision for you, like eventually you’ll have to start reflecting on how stuff is going. Even if you don’t want to.
SAMI:
And so I’m conscious we’ve, we’ve taken up a lot of your time Aviah so I just want I want to ask you the final question that we had, if that’s all right which is what can people do, if they are super inspired by what they’ve heard, whether they are or are not in Hackney, what can people. what can people do to get involved in stuff?
AVIAH:
So, and there are, and there are there, there have been since you know the end of last year, a number of cop watch groups that have sprung up, not only in London, but across the country. And, you know, and there’s, there’s some in different boroughs all over all over London. And so I encourage, you know, encourage, we don’t actually have rockers so depository at the moment. But I think, you know, if people listening like emailed Sisters Uncut or like dm’s, you know, Hackney CopWatch or whatever and was like, oh, is there one in this area, you know, our I’m interested in setting one up, like, yeah, you will be able to get in touch with someone to help you. There’s got to be a more streamlined way of doing that, which we’ve not had capacity to sort out yet but, and hopefully will and. But yeah, I encourage you to either get in touch with a copwatch group, on, on Twitter, or email Sisters Uncut at gmail. com to ask any questions about that. And if there isn’t one in your area we would like be very happy to help you set one up. And, but yeah i think i think the point is, you know, and also yeah I wanted to mention this groups outside London and Manchester cop watch absolutely popping, in Liverpool we’ve got one called busy watch for anyone who doesn’t know what a busy is, it’s scouts for a cop.
And so yeah there’s a there’s a, there’s one in is one Wales, I can’t remember the name
ALI: Yeah it’s Y Pantherod, which is The Panthers in Welsh, or Cardiff Copwatch
But yeah, there’s there’s different groups like across the country and across the capital as well. So like, Yeah, get in touch. And, and, and get involved like there’s, there’s shit happening right now people there’s a lot of energy for this, and the pressure is really mounting and that’s you know that’s why they’re scrambling around for solutions like trying to get rid of Cressida Dick a year too late. You know, it’s like they’re feeling the pressure and now’s the time to like escalate.
SAMI:
I love it. What a, what a thing to end on. Now is the time to escalate everybody. Okey dokey, great. Thank you so much for taking the time today. This has been super useful, and I’m glad that we managed to have a have a sneaky post season two of our podcast thing and still managed to chat to you because I think that all this cop watch stuff is, you know, if you’re if you’re the kind of person. We talk sometimes about who listens to this podcast, and we feel like we have one audience, which is like people who like would use maybe previously would have described themselves as like politically active but then like as a burnout whatever they are just not doing stuff any more. If now is the time when you’re like maybe I wanna get involved in stuff, cop watch feels like a great thing to potentially put your time into. So thanks Aviah – lovely to chat to you.
ALI – Thanks once again for listening to this bonus episode of the Resist + Renew podcast. Thanks to Aviah from Sisters, Copwatch and many other things for being interviewed. Thanks to Katherine for doing the transcript on this episode and to Kareem and Klaus for their respective bits of music.
That is now it for this season, thanks for listening and supporting in whatever way you did. We’re going to take a good long break now and maybe we’ll be back with season 3, some time in the future.
Do follow us on social media, get in touch for the usual facilitation stuff and yeah, see you around. Byeee!