
Looting is Not the Issue

The National Lawyer’s Guild has a “pocket-sized know-your-rights booklet…designed to be a practical resource for people dealing with law enforcement. The 16-page primer advises people of their rights when confronted by FBI agents or the Department of Homeland Security. It also includes information for noncitizens and minors.
A translation of an except of “Activtist’s Cookbook” from smrc8a.org
What you need to know about arrests
Identify an emergency contact. Make sure they know your name in both English and Chinese. After an arrest, you will need to tell them which police station you are at so they can help bring you a legal representative.
The police may issue warnings, requests or messages through a loudspeaker and/or by raising various coloured (yellow, red, etc.) flags. Take note of their procedure, stay calm and discuss how you want to respond with fellow activists.
Aside from your name, address and HKID number, you can choose not to answer any other questions. Many people fall prey to the carrot and stick methods of the police and accidentally signed a statement that contains an admission of an offence. Beware of the following when giving a statement:
“She describes it as ‘peace privilege,’ approaching the world from a stability that allows for simplifications.
There’s always a lot of denial going on when trauma interrupts our safe outlook on life. We know that people in general don’t want to see horror except in comfortable contexts (like fiction) so seeing human beings systematically torturing, starving and hurting others makes us feel vulnerable, impotent or responsible. It makes us question the comfortable assumptions of our own lives and why have we grown in a safe environment (could it have been by chance?).”
—Manuel Llorens, “‘Peace privilege’ Also Means Disgust for Someone Else’s Suffering.” Caracas Chronicles. May 3, 2019.
And if it is by chance, will the dice roll differently, for me, sometime soon? Fix space and flow across time and we all live in a Caracas, It’s just not Caracas today.
Example: gun control is trying to reduce the systemic risk of individual violence while, at the same time, increasing the systemic risk of organizational and state violence. Are people in Caracas safer when all the guns are in the hands of the colectivos, police and military? What happens when the place you make your home becomes Caracas?