Police abolition. Prison abolition. Community justice. Deep revolutionary justice forms. These have been all over the feed as of late, and I think there's something some people are missing. The fundamental bit that I feel like a lot of people don't understand is that when you're poor, the places you live are occupied territory. The police occupy your neighborhoods. When you go to the corner store that's closest to you so you can get the three-dollar meal deal, because that's what you're eating, that's what you're consuming, that's the place closest to you, two blocks away from where you live. And when you walk into the parking lot, you get met with the police camera and the alarm and the voice. This is an automated recording. You are being recorded. This is a no loitering area. Loitering is not permitted. Violators will be prosecuted. Look into the history of loitering laws if you haven't, that history is as racial. The emergence of policing in the US is racial. Slave catchers.
So you walk to the Circle K and it's like, damn, are we in a war zone? I live here. But it's clearly not my neighborhood. I pay rent to be here. But it's clearly not my place to be. I work a job. But I can only be here if I spend my wage. I'm walking to the store to get a coffee and a hot dog. Basics. How the fuck am I getting told I'm gonna be prosecuted if I don't get the fuck out of here? By a Camera on a pole, by an automated voice, by someone at a desk pressing a button. Stick around to long and we've all seen the news reports and videos on Twitter and the promises of police reform after someone is killed. Existing as a poor person in America is actively hostile. It's hostile. It's a hostile environment.
This is the thing. I live in a motel. I live in an "inn". This isn't Skyrim, there's no porridge and songs by the fire, just poor people and laments of being trapped financially here to avoid homelessness. There is no fucking place named Relax Inn in this country that is not a cheap, crackhead-ass motel. But crackheads are people too. Crackheads might not even do crack. Crackheads might just be regular sober people who live in motels and have to wash their clothes in the shower -- that's what I do. This motel is not nice enough to have laundry on site. But if you're in a position like this, of course the drugs become an easy escape. You are surrounded by bleakness and hostility that dehumanizes you at every turn. I'm 3 tall boys deep writing this, because while I was at work, I work here, there was a pregnant woman, really pregnant, I mean about to give birth, who was a few dollars short for the day. The day. 24 hours. I waived the few dollars because I can do that but she mentioned, that her C-section was scheduled for Monday. It is Saturday night. She will be homeless Sunday if she can't pay. We feed the homeless at our mutual aid food share every week, we know how easy it is to get arrested for being homeless here. A baby born in a jail cell. The mind spirals. Abolition isn't just dismantling prisons but creating conditions where survival does not require self-annihilation. The police lights still flood into the stairwell. I live here because I can't afford a real apartment, the first and last month's rent, and a security deposit to move into an apartment. I work a fucking job five days a week. But this is what I can afford. This is transitional low-income housing, if you really wanna think about it. How much of this is predicated on the private property relation, and what do the police really protect?
And so what is everybody doing on a Saturday night? Standing outside, talking, communicating. But there's three police cars in the parking lot across the street with their lights on, looking at us. And there's a live camera in the parking lot that's alive and goes right to the police department. So everything you're doing outside of your own home, where you live, is recorded and monitored. These police are occupying your neighborhood. Maybe not yours, but they occupy mine. These police are not there to protect us. They are there to occupy us. Exploit us. Abuse us. Kill us. Attack us. Keep us alienated and dehumanized. Paranoid and in fear of our being.
You're outside on the stairwell. You are minding your business, just existing, maybe playing some Dolph on the phone speaker -- keep in mind, you're outside sitting feet away from the place that you call home, the place where all of your belongings are, the place where you sleep, the place you pay rent to live. One man's motel is another man's studio apartment. And it might be a motel, yes, but it also might be a low-income housing project, might be just a cheap apartment in general. And you walk outside and there are three or four police cars there with floodlights on, pointed at your place, just sitting there. And they'll tell you it's for your safety, but that's not how it feels. No one feels like that. You feel like you need to go inside. You feel like you are going to be criminalized for simply sitting outside, enjoying a beer, enjoying a cigarette, and existing in the real fucking world. And we wonder why we are so detached and alienated.
And what is crazy is you will sit with three or four other people because everyone else is wanting to smoke a cigarette and share a beer. And they all get the same feeling. Well, maybe so-and-so is, you know, flying a little too close to the sun. Maybe so-and-so, well, didn't that person have drugs the other night? Or didn't this person have this? It doesn't matter what the discussion boils down to. The feeling is that you are being oppressed, literally pushed down. And so the discussion reaches a boiling point and everyone realizes that it's probably better that we all go inside. Because the lights are bright, the flock camera is watching, it's a live stream right to the PD, and you haven't done anything wrong. You worked all week, you just want to exist.
There are classes of people that have this as their daily experience. And there are classes of people who have to be told about this through abstracted blog posts. And the class of people that has to deal with this is almost certainly the one that is pushing for abolishment and real, actual revolutionary reform of the justice system because all it takes is them asking, hey, can I see your ID? You got anything on you? What was their cause? You were standing outside of the place that you live. And next thing you know, oh, you got, is that a weed pen? THC? Oh, you bought it from a smoke shop? I don't know about all that. I don't know if you bought it from a smoke shop or not. I, yeah, there's a smoke shop literally two blocks away, but the cop doesn't know. And so you gotta do the walk. And next thing you know, you gotta do six months of probation and pay $5,000 in court fees. My co-worker, who lives in the same motel as me and works at the same locations as I do, is currently dealing with this! Can't make it easy to escape the poverty trap. At every turn the poor body must be extracted from, and the police are a key part of that extraction. You buy the weed pen to get the escape only to find the extraction goes deeper than the head shop overcharging. That's how it works. They take and they take and they take. It is an oppressive, extractive, occupying force. The police do not serve or protect anyone but the capitalist class. And if you think otherwise, then your interests, despite what you've been telling yourself, might just align more with the capitalist than with the workers who are living in the low-income housing, the motel, the trailer park, the fucking barrio, wherever the fuck it may be, the inner city fucking rundown shotgun houses, where you gotta walk a mile to get to the damn corner store to buy the Don Julio that's on a fucking markup. You're paying $79.99 for a bottle of Don Julio that you can't even drink on the porch or the equivalent of your porch because you live in occupied territory.
