Queer Anarchists March in Tucson for Kayden Clarke

Submitted to It’s Going Down

Queer anarchists and others marched in Tucson in response to the murder of Kayden Clarke by police in Mesa, AZ. Below is the text of a flyer distributed during the march. There were no arrests, despite the fact that a fair amount of construction signage was dragged into the street to obstruct police, which is something of an escalation for street actions in Tucson.

The text for a flyer distributed to those on the street read:

We Remember Kayden Clark, Killed by Arizona Police
Against the Police – Against Capitalist Health Care
We Will Remember What They Try to Erase

Kayden Clarke was a 24 year-old transgender man with Asperger’s and several mental health diagnoses killed by police responding to a suicide call in Mesa, AZ, on Thursday, February 4th. Kayden’s murder demonstrates the absolute inability of police to respond to mental health crises, or anything else, as well as the constant, systemic violence directed towards transgender people and towards those whose mental health needs are neglected and erased by this system.

No amount of training or reform can meaningfully reduce the level of violence inflicted by police, nor change their core function. In fact, the day before Kayden’s murder, law enforcement in Maricopa County held a training on non-lethal responses to mental health crises – these trainings only serve to put makeup on our corpses. The police exist to control and manage, through constant violence, populations deemed threatening or even potentially threatening to the dominant social order – poor people, people of color, queer and trans folks, indigenous communities, disabled people, neurodivergent people, and especially those with more than one of these overlapping targets on our backs.

The violence of the state is not limited to its obvious manifestation in the police, but extends also into a medical-industrial complex which is incapable of addressing the complex medical and psychological needs that we all face. It is this entire society that criminalizes and attacks those of us deemed marginal or expendable by the state, heteropatriarchy, capital, colonialism and white supremacy.

The Police Don’t Keep Us Safe

Report from a local student newspaper here.

 

 

Tags: Trans