Durham, NC: Firms Working with Sheriff’s Office Sabotaged

The following communique was anonymously sent to It’s Going Down which we publish below.

It reads:

Since the recent uprising against the police, sparked by the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and also centuries of systemic anti-blackness and state violence, we have witnessed a historic outpouring of grief and rage. We have found others in the street, also eager and desperate to reach a new horizon without police. Despite the Democratic Party co-optation, the liberal respectability nonsense, and conspiracy theories about outside agitators, we have had glimpses of real possibility: of a world where a late rent payment, a mental health episode, or just daily efforts to survive under capitalism as Black, indigenous, POC, or poor, don’t result in armed officers of the state showing up with guns blazing.

In spite of this possibility, the progressive city of Durham has exposed its true form perfectly. In the midst of this historic rebellion, of thousands of people rioting and protesting almost daily throughout the triangle, these political parasites, elected with the help of Durham’s non-profit sector and lefty “allies,” voted to INCREASE the city’s police budget by 5 percent. Alongside this, the Sheriff’s Department is getting new toys, including a $220,000 renovation to its shooting range.

We are not disappointed by this, because we expected nothing more from them. Abolition is not charity bestowed by those above, and it cannot be begged for or even demanded of those in Power—it is a gift that those below give each other through joyful defiance and the willful creation of a new world on their own terms.

So we paid a visit to two architectural firms contracted to renovate said shooting range, who in their greed and complicity have chosen the moment of a black-led movement against police murder to actively aid the police in firearms training. RND Architects, off University Blvd, and Coulter Jewell Thames PA, at 111 W. Main St. in downtown, were smashed out and left painted, as a soft encouragement for them to do business elsewhere. We hope that these complicit companies become a regular stopping point on the constant marches and actions popping off.

-Fuck 12.