All Charges must be Dropped for People Arrested During the George Floyd Uprising!

Call from the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (RAM) to drop all charges stemming from the rebellion.

In the last few weeks, people have been denied phone calls, water, and food in custody. Jamel Floyd has died as a result of being attacked by corrections officers. People have been brutalized in the streets and in custody. The state seeks guilty verdicts for our comrades in order to distract people from its own guilt for the violence of its arrests, and for the overall violent systemic conditions that led to this rebellion. All held in custody without bail from the beginning of the uprising be released immediately.

Regardless of the charge, all alleged actions taken by our comrades are a direct response to white supremacist violence that law enforcement and government at large are responsible for perpetuating and allowing to happen with gross impunity. Guilty or innocent, all have our unconditional solidarity.

As politicians in both local and national standing scramble to “make things right” via defunding a fraction of policing budgets, or by promising investigations, we must ensure material change that makes a difference to the future of Black and brown communities in the US. As such, we stand in solidarity with calls to abolish police, abolish prisons, and to topple monuments that celebrate colonization, xenophobia, and anti-Blackness.

We call on organizers, individuals, and groups invested in the dismantling of white supremacy in the United States to include dropping the charges into your demands. We ask that you consider the consequences of calls for “PEACEFUL” protest. As Fanon has stated in Wretched of the Earth, the relationship between the colonizer and the oppressed is a violent one from the beginning. There is no such thing as a peaceful protest, when one group is able to murder and jail the other with impunity. Calls for ‘peaceful protest’ contribute to criminalizing demonstrations by setting up a good protestor/bad protestor dichotomy that invites law enforcement presence, repression, and carceral consequences for those involved. This can be seen by the numerous assaults by police and curfews during the uprising. Regardless of tactics, people must not be assaulted in the streets and despite moral high grounds, the struggle got to this point – where the State is scrambling for concessions to preserve itself – by burning the 3rd precinct to the ground.

A new start is not possible without the release of the people who have led us to this point – actions carried by people in this uprising, and the ones taken by elder political prisoners in the US. There cannot be a society free of racism without freedom for those who are caged for fighting against it. Moving forward means an acknowledgement that the United States is built on violence and must be dealt with as such. Getting rid of oppressive violence of the State means amnesty for all involved in this collective struggle.

Lastly, the rebellions will continue until all free.