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Summer of 2020---The Civil Unrest Thread--Read OP Before Posting (in memory of George Floyd)

Jumbo

By Jumbo
in The Tailgate

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China

China

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Posted

Long...

 

They Built a Utopian Sanctuary in a Minneapolis Hotel. Then They Got Evicted.

 

The Saturday after George Floyd was killed, Abu Bakr Bryant, a 29-year-old from Minneapolis, found himself walking dazedly among the charred remains of Chicago Avenue, the street where Floyd took his last breaths. Shops and restaurants smoldered. Windows had been boarded up. A melted stoplight hung midair like a piece of abstract art. He had on his person the entirety of his worldly possessions: a change of clothes, his cellphone, and his wallet. Bryant had been living out of his car until the previous evening, when he went to protest. The protests turned into firestorms, and when he got back to his car, he found that it was on fire, too.

 

Nine blocks north of the intersection that had turned into a memorial to Floyd, Bryant passed by a former Sheraton hotel with handwritten signs saying “sanctuary” taped on the windows. With the exception of a couple holes from rocks thrown at the double-paned windows, the building was miraculously unscathed. He walked in and asked to use the bathroom. The people inside offered him food and a hotel room—for free. “I thought it was a joke,” he told me.

 

IMG_6025_a.jpg

 

The 136-room hotel had been transformed into a pop-up homeless shelter of sorts, with no staff and virtually no rules. The hotel’s typical guests had been ordered to evacuate when the protests in Minneapolis heated up. In their place now were between 200 and 300 previously unhoused people—no one knew exactly how many—with more arriving each day to be put on a waitlist. When I visited for the first time, in early June, residents napped on leather sofas in the lobby using hotel sheets and pillows. Behind the bar, volunteers handed out chicken fajitas. Food donations filled the kitchen and the walk-in fridge.

 

The hotel teemed with volunteers, part of an ever-shifting collection of 120 servers, artists, medics, librarians, social workers, and others. From the start, the operation was democratic and decentralized—there was no hierarchy, no fund for donations, no spokesperson, not even a name (one suggestion was the “Share-a-Ton”). 

 

Click on the link for the rest

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Destino

Destino

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On 6/12/2020 at 10:05 PM, Larry said:

WTF is an "autonomous zone"?  

It’s like a cult compound but for political radicals rather than religious nuts.  Some people get together and try to make their own little society.  How charitably they’re described depends on the sympathies held by the person doing the writing.  

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dfitzo53

dfitzo53

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I think it's important for people like Rex Chapman who are trying to do good work reporting on this stuff to stick to the facts. There weren't six cops holding him down, there were maybe three. While it was kind of a punk move for the cop to stop like that, the protestor never should've been right up in a cop's personal space when there's a wide open street.

 

Sleeping in a drive through didn't end in death. Attacking the police, stealing a taser, and pointing it at the cops ended in death. You can debate whether that's reasonable, but lets at least stick to what happened.

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Destino

Destino

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2 hours ago, visionary said:

 

 

 

Blindly defunding is a stupid plan and always has been.  People like to imagine that if you just cut police budgets they'll only cut out the parts you don't like and we ignore that there plenty of reason to think aspects of justice system are under funded.  Labs aren't backed up because cops bought an armored truck.  Courts aren't backed up, leaving people in limbo, because police got new grenade launchers.  The system needs to be redesigned with care and specific goals in mind.  It won't be simple, easy, or cheap.  

 

And people that think social workers are going to magically show up when people call 911 are dreaming.  They aren't first responders right now.  This is an entirely new function for government workers that has to be built from the ground up and integrated into current emergency response.  If you're old enough to pay all of your own bills, that last sentence sounded expensive as hell. 

 

Blind budget cuts are a republican approach to government problems, and it usually ends with a privatizing argument after the underfunded agency sees a decline in performance.

 

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