Start using public key cryptography to the extent possible in your private correspondence. Encourage others to do so. Help non-technical users get started with it.

Support your neighborhood CopWatch. If you don’t have a neighborhood CopWatch, get in touch with the nearest one and ask for their advice and/or help in starting one.

Write to public forums that don’t usually publish anarchist material, but where you stand a chance of getting published anyway, explicitly advocating anarchism. For example, a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Include pointers to online resources where people can learn more about anarchist takes on the issue you’re writing about.

Find ways to get things that you need outside of the documented cash economy. For example, if there’s a Food Not Bombs in your town, you can get to know a bunch of other anarchists, do some mutual aid work, and, in the process, get some free food for your labor. If there isn’t a Food Not Bombs in your town yet, again, get in touch with existing FNB groups and try to start one. (There are lots of guides online.)

If you have it, I’d also recommend contributing some money to groups that provide direct relief and aid for victims of violence, and which combat cultural attitudes that promote violence. For example, I give a fixed percentage of my income to women’s shelters and groups like Women for Women International (which focuses on relief for women in war zones). By doing so I not only provide direct aid to real people and to a network of institutions which can supplant the supposed welfare functions of the State; I also remove that much more money from the taxed economy, and put it toward the purpose of healing and mutual aid, rather than what it would otherwise have been used for — graft, handcuffs, bombs, prisons, etc.

Radfem,

I think the sad fact is that it’s never going to come up in the Presidential campaign, or in any other electoral campaign, because there’s no real disagreement within the ruling class over the issue of police brutality; both of them believe that the hirelings of the (white, male) State should be given every possible benefit of the doubt, and some impossible benefits of the doubt besides, in their use of violence to “control the situation” in dealing with people who are “suspect” in the eyes of the (white, male) State. Meanwhile their victims, especially people of color, “belligerent” women, etc., should be automatically presumed to be either liars or crazy if they complain about their treatment at the hands of police. Nearly all of the leadership in both of the major parties believe in this because it’s in their interest to believe it; they both want control of the State apparatus, and when they have that apparatus in their hands, they want it to be an effective weapon, which requires a brutal and unchecked police force. Besides which, anyone who exhibited enough humanity to see through the politics, and dared to suggest anything different would be promptly crucified by the Fraternal Order of Police and the howling sado-fascist bully brigade that gets their back in every major media outlet. The only real constituency for reform on this issue are a handful of radical political activists who have made this a pet issue, and a vast run of ordinary people who have been themselves threatened or hurt by police violence–and neither of these groups have or are likely to have any real power in partisan politicking anytime soon. And since there is no real difference within the ruling class on the issue, there’s no real wedge for driving it into the stage-managed political debate.

It’s for precisely this reason that I think any attempt at healing the survivors and defending ourselves from police violence has to come through fundamentally different means–means which disrupt, or simply bypass, that stage-managed political debate in favor of much more direct action. For example, supporting your neighborhood CopWatch.