From Chicago ABCF
Chicago Police Attack the Marathon and Generator Show Seizing Equipment and Arresting Four
On Saturday the 19th of September, chapters of the Anarchist Black Cross Federation (ABCF) on occupied Turtle Island held the annual Running Down the Walls (RDTW) non-competitive solidarity 5K marathon and fundraiser event. Each year people hit the concrete both inside and outside prisons for a collective run, walk, roll and march towards freedom for political prisoners and the abolition of prisons. RDTW is also the primary yearly push to raise funds for the ABCF Warchest which each month puts money on the books of political prisoners/prisoners of war to help with commissary, communications and other financial needs. This year Running Down The Walls events were held in Los Angeles CA, Bloomington IN, Philadelphia PA, Brooklyn NY, Kingston NY, Ft Lauderdale FL, Lowell MA, Eugene OR and Chicago IL.
This year’s Chicago RDTW descended upon the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), a brutalist downtown skyscraper imposing harshly upon an otherwise pleasant tree-laden plaza that had until recently been fenced off from protesters and people looking for a place to hang out in public. MCC is also kitty-corner to the ICE Field Office as well as State Department and U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services offices. This was the second year that RDTW was held at MCC, also the site of occasional noise demos, but is not subject to nearly enough attention considering all that has happened at the hands of the feds in Chicago and elsewhere this past few years.
The federal Bureau of Prisons holds our comrades captive in a dehumanizing destitute existence that has only increased in cruelty as the Trump Administration weaponizes the DOJ against immigrants and resistance movements. It’s been a hard year of escalating fascist repression: militarized stormtroopers rampaging neighborhoods to kidnap undocumented people into networks of imprisonment and deportation, the targeting of dissent as “terrorism” with manufactured federal conspiracies and lengthy sentences, increased repression of political prisoners behind the walls, and even the criminalization of zines and blogs. If prisons are escalating, so must we; as long as our comrades inside are fighting, know that we will also take the struggle to the front gates. We also do it a bit different in Chicago; for the sixth year in addition to the rally march and marathon we planned a generator show with bands and DJs blasting punk, hip hop, and techno right outside the prison walls so the people held inside can enjoy, dance along with us, and know we got their back.
As people took to the plaza hanging banners and setting up tables for zines and food, almost immediately the Chicago Police Department arrived and began intimidating the crowd with threats of arrest and violence over the unpermitted gathering and the mobile soundsystem. Of course we never need or seek permission from the state to gather in public, but the MCC and the park in front of it is federal property under the proclaimed jurisdiction of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Local, county, and state police continue to work on behalf of federal agencies, not only BOP. Illinois State Police, Chicago Police and others have coordinated with the feds to spy on anti-ICE organizing and provide security stabilizing the federal kidnapping apparatus outside Broadview and throughout the state (much like outside Delaney Hall or MDC Los Angeles and so on)– despite the so-called “TRUST Act,” a reform meant to protect the image of local and state police from being linked to immigration enforcement. So not surprising it was dozens of CPD who pulled up menacingly with the white shirts arguing about federal noise regulations on the plaza after having met with the feds inside the jail. After resisting the initial barrage of police threats and reclaiming the park, the rally began defiantly reading the statements and recordings that political prisoners prepared for the event.
Champagne Song called in to read their statement and conversate with the people, reminding us that we are a sea that is unstoppable, that we will win; an encouraging confidence in our collective strength standing in front of a building that will not exist in 100 years, the sentence Champagne received for showing solidarity outside the Prairieland detention center: it is our every intent collectively that we will free them and the rest long before they’ll have to do those decades.
A recording of Malik Muhammad’s statement was then played unsettling the comfort of our action through a challenge to movements for prisoner solidarity, never losing sight that we will not run down these walls without tanks and the material means to tear away the cages that separate our kin. We continued with statements from Oso Blanco, Peppy, and Bill Dunne that running down these walls is an act of radical solidarity with tangible material consequences for those inside. A poem was read written by Ashley Wildfire, a participant in a group of RDTW runners this year inside Coffee Creek prison in Oregon. Dwayne “BIM 365” Staats from the Vaughn 17 uprising requested we play his recently released single “Liberation the new High”, speakers blasting revolutionary music from behind bars to the chagrin of the police who remained circled around the plaza.
After closing the rally out with a few announcements of other local projects, dozens began the 5K’s first lap around MCC marching together behind the “Running Down The Walls” banner, mobile soundsystem blasting. The march took Ida B. Wells Drive heading West momentarily shutting down traffic directly in front of the ICE Field Office. On the return down Clark Street, CPD bike cops caught up and tried, unsuccessfully, to push participants onto the sidewalk. Returning to the plaza in front of MCC, the rest of the marathon kicked off with a countup to “Fuck 12” and completed the run in small groups and individuals finishing the remaining six laps of the 5K. Throughout the evening participants could hear people from inside MCC loudly rapping on their thin windows echoing down to the street and plaza below below while others flashed their cell lights. Their agency was palpable throughout the night, a reminder to participants how fragile the space between inside and outside is and how we can break the contradiction by showing up outside and running together (as well as building relationships for long term support through letter writing, court support, publishing, phone zaps and other work of the ABCF)
As evening turned to dusk the DJ set kicked off, the crowd grew despite some rain, and the other artists began to prepare their keyboards and drums. Several dozen CPD began amassing and threatening the crowd again: after a police lieutenant proclaimed that any musician who performed would have their equipment confiscated and risk arrest, a heated debate was held with regard to the volume of a keyboard in a last ditch effort to save the show, but the white shirts were not budging. As they aggressively tried intruding, participants formed a line and linked arms to protect the space; bouncy techno continued loudly from the mobile sound system. The impasse stabilized a bit or so we thought as the white shirts were now saying the level of sound still playing was acceptable; still, people began considering a backup plan to move the show to a well-known outdoor show spot (which ultimately would have been a bust anyways as it began torrentially raining an hour later); however, the cops were making plans of their own.
Without warning or orders of dispersal, two groups of cops sneakily flanked from the side and the back of the park grabbing the mobile sound system, beginning a tug-of-war that drew more people in from all sides until a full-blown cop moshpit ensued. Dozens of cops, outnumbered, quickly tired themselves out and pulled back, eventually satisfying themselves with arresting four people they targeted during the fracas – though the courageous efforts of those in the front helped to prevent many others from being snatched up. Angry at the cops’ dirty sneak attack, the people stood up to the cops and chanted “FREE THEM ALL!”, raising the spirits of the comrades held in the dozens of police cars and trucks lighting up the spectacle in front of the federal jail.
As the dust was settling, the rain started pouring, and people checked in on each other, gathered the gear and organized jail support. All arrestees were out within 24 hours, but four still face a misdemeanor resisting arrest charge. The rest of the bands and performers couldn’t play, but people still felt pretty good about how it went down, largely owing to what one participant called “the furious love and support everyone out there (not the cops) showed each other”. Could have thrown a chill fundraiser in a park or DIY space yes, but sometimes, and especially now, the underground must surface make a stand and take action. As “Riot Fest” festival gentrifiers were destroying Douglass Park, the real riot fest goes down when punks seek no permits, take the pit to the streets and fight the system.
The attack on RDTW is not an exception but another all-too-common example of the state’s reification of all space as governable through police enforcement. The settler project is intimately bound with how space is organized, and any act that transgresses such rigidity is met with violent force. The heightened policing and criminalization of Black and Brown youth in the teen takeover movement further demonstrates this paradigm: conservative aldermen call for “snap curfews” and increased policing while they sell off public parks to Riot Fest and hassle people selling water outside, running off street musicians and unlicensed vendors; the cops even stopping people waving Mexican flags out their cars during Mexican Independence Day. Many of the same cops who attacked RDTW just days later brutalized and arrested people for simply drinking lemonade in public, nevermind the city salt trucks blocking protests off from ever going north of the river or outside Trump Tower. The space of downtown Chicago is reserved for the ostensibly white, masculine, capitalist class, while Black/Brown youth who righteously defy the city’s deep segregation are subjected to not only increased surveillance and violence, but also subjugated to liberal conceptions of morality which say they do not belong. In this the public space becomes legible as space defined through colonialism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery, segregation, and of course the prisons, detention centers, and jails.
With this understanding, Running Down The Walls then is, first, an act of solidarity with longterm political prisoners and prisoners of war whose personal efforts and sacrifices attack and delegitimize the colonial production of racial capitalism and the spatial arrangements it necessitates. Second, RDTW is itself an act of confrontation against the rigidity of space – the understanding that the jail should not be approached by people from the outside unless deemed permissible by the strict bureaucratic scrutiny and surveillance of the state. By approaching the Bureau of Prisons’ plaza, participants defiantly negate the jail’s imposing facade, a zone materially and ideologically between the city and the jail, and run together with one another. The tapping of windows and the flickering of the lights by people held captive inside, and the chants, banners, and waving of people on the outside cross the real and imagined walls of separation to make contact. That this contact was fleeting, limited, and primarily ephemeral recalls Malik Muhammad’s words that running down these walls will not happen without the tanks. Our efforts cannot forget this, that means mean material, that prisons are war, genocidal war. This war has been furnished and polished by the genocide of Indigenous, Black, and Brown bodies, by slavery through dispossession and the abduction of Afrikan peoples that continues today through the police and prisons. CPD and BOP and ICE are the same slave catchers. Any action that approaches the prisons, jails, and detention centers should not forget that this is war.
For the destruction of prison society! Free all political prisoners! Free them all!
