Richmond, VA: Police Monument Vandalized Again

Submitted to It’s Going Down

Almost two weeks ago, on National Night Out, we vandalized the recently moved police memorial in Byrd Park. Its become a regular practice to vandalize the many monuments to white supremacy in Richmond, as a reminder to both friends and enemies that resistance exists here. The supposed social peace that exists in Richmond manifests as a “friendlier” form of policing, repressing rebels in Richmond with soft policing, snitching, southern politeness and a general view that the shit we watch happening in Ferguson, Baltimore, Oakland, Cleveland, Dallas, or Staten Island doesn’t happen here. We call bullshit. While we don’t know the others who have repeatedly written on other monuments, we leave this as a signal to them, as a show of solidarity.

While the tactics of police warfare may not look like New York or the Bay, the war against the black, brown, and poor is often brought home in smaller cities through “police community engagement”, community snitching, and long disproven broken window theories that kill culture and whitewash neighborhoods. We increasingly live in a plastic suburbia that has been moved to the inner city. The things that kept us here or drew us here are being eroded away, and while the pigs may not gun people down in the streets regularly like in Baltimore or Denver, they still lock people up in a jail with 2.5 times the death rate of other parts of the country. They still harass black children. They still destroy homeless camps and steal their shit.

Fuck the police. Fuck their smiles, their ice cream and their fucking Night Out. Fuck their thin blue line flags and their prison gulags. The social order they protect is crumbling and we couldn’t be happier about it.

– some anarchists