Season 2 episode 15 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we interview Aviah. A sneaky extra episode after the season closer! It took us a while to get back together.

Aviah is a lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, and is a community organiser the rest of the time. She is involved in the East End branch of Sisters Uncut, a national direct-action collective fighting cuts to domestic violence services as well as state violence. She is also involved in Hackney Copwatch, London Renters Union and the Kill the Bill Coalition, a national movement resisting the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill.

“Effectively, if you can organise enough people to [know their rights and intervene] in a coordinated way, then you can actually withdraw consent from policing altogether”

- Aviah

Show notes, links

Netpol: the network for police monitoring

Newham Monitoring Project, which shut down in 2016 after running for 36 years

United Families and Friends Campaign, a coalition of people affected by deaths in state custody.

There are Copwatch groups in Hackney, Bristol, Manchester, Lambeth, Liverpool, Southwark, Haringey, and Cardiff.

the Anti-Raids Network, community resistance to immigration raids

To find out about Copwatch, if you're considering getting involved: either DM an existing group (accounts listed above) or email [email protected]!

We now have a Patreon! Please help keep the podcast going, at patreon.com/resistrenew. If not, there's always the classic ways to support: like, share, and subscribe!

Transcript

SAMI:

Hello everybody and welcome to this sneaky extra episode of The Resist and Renew Podcast, where we are interviewing Aviah. Do you want to say hi?

AVIAH:

Hi.

SAMI:

Seamless. So Aviah is a lecturer, at Birkbeck, which is part of the University of London, and also does a lot of community organizing, and she's involved in the East End branch of Sisters Uncut, which is one branch of a national organization that's like a direct action collective fighting cuts to domestic violence services, and other forms of state violence, and Aviah is also involved in local branches of CopWatch so Hackney CopWatch and London Renters Union, and is also involved Kill the Bill coalition - a national movement resisting the Policing Crime and Sentencing Bill that is currently going through the parliamentary organs, as we record this in early March, 2022.

SAMI:

So first things first.. Aviah what can you say about the political context that you are organizing in?

AVIAH:

The current political context is probably the most intense political context I’ve ever organized in. It's been a very intense year. And, yeah, there's, there's a sort of ongoing political crisis, particularly for the Metropolitan Police, that we, you know, at Sisters Uncut and also the Kill the Bill coalition and cop watch groups have been organizing to exploit. If that doesn't sound too Machiavellian, maybe I don't mind if it sounds too Machiavellian, I do want to destroy the cops, that's fine.

AVIAH:

But yeah, I guess that kind of that emerged out of, you know, I mean Sisters Uncut have been organizing around policing and the impact of policing, particularly around gendered violence, for like a number of years. And, you know, there's the occupation of Holloway prison, organizing around the death of Sarah Read a few years ago in Holloway prison. And, and, yeah, highlighting the, you know, spending years organizing highlighting the dangers of what we call, like many sort of black feminists call carceral feminism and the kind of feminism that invest in the police and prisons, as a sort of remedy for gendered violence and that actually you know we've been organizing around that for years to kind of highlight how dangerous and how effectively, it ends up punishing the survivors it claims to be supporting.

AVIAH:

And it was in that context of years of sort of organizing around that that situation emerged around the disappearance, and murder of Sarah Everard. And, and, yeah, I mean, you know, she was quite a relatively unusual situation that happened, and of, you know, a targeted kidnapping. In full view, you know, on the streets doesn't happen very often. It's not usually the way, you know, women are targeted for gendered violence is quite rare to sort of for strangers to sort of abduct someone and kill them, and that being said, you as it emerged at the person who had done that was the serving Metropolitan Police Officer. And later, and as it emerged that he had used all of the state apparatus that was given to him in order to carry that out and actually arrested, kidnapped her in front of passers by. That in itself created a huge huge huge situation political situation for the Metropolitan Police.

AVIAH:

In the early days after her disappearance, you know, there was a video that was announced by Reclaim the Streets and, which they started as a response to the fact that the police were telling women in Lamberth to sort of stay at home when when Sarah Everard had gone missing and the person who was responsible for her disappearance was still at that point on launch at large and unknown. And, you know, they were telling women to stay at home and reclaim the streets decided to have this vigil as a response to that. What they interpreted as police misogyny as making it you know women's responsibility to essentially curfew themselves as their protection and not actually be part of public life, essentially, and you know, the Metropolitan Police did everything within the within their power to stop reclaim the streets from going ahead with their vigil, and they went down the sort of legalistic route to try and to try and gain the this legal right to to do that because it was during lockdown and the police were interpreting the lockdown rules as basically banning protest in any kind of assembly.

AVIAH:

And, and, you know, they went to the High Court, and all of this and eventually they actually because the police were still refusing to facilitate this as legal protest or legal vigil reclaim the streets, stepped down stepped out of the original and kind of tried to cancel the vigil, the last minute on the day of it. And it was highly publicized. A lot of people were planning on going anyway. Sisters Uncut had said this, few days before that we were going to be there and present, and we took the decision to go anyway. And, yeah, it was, it was after that, that, you know, basically, we went. The police initiated a violent crack down. That was very highly publicized by the media, the violence of it, and the context of of that kind of violence was very shocking to a lot of people, a lot of people who might not ordinarily be particularly critical with the police. And, and, and we essentially, you know, made the argument that if people are you know we've known for a very long time and been very realistic about the violence of the police we weren't really, particularly surprised at their violence, we've been organizing this for a number of years. And at that point when when so much of this sort of media attention was had pivoted towards this incident, both in terms of Sarah Everard, but also the violence of the police officers at the video and her name. You know, we kind of highlighted that the following week, more powers were being proposed to be given to the police. And it was out of that, that, you know, we thought it was important to mobilize against the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts bill.

AVIAH:

And, Yeah. Over the last year, we've kind of seen the political crisis for policing essentially, only grow, and the movement for the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts bill or Kill the Bill has also sort of grown and matured and yeah so now we're in a situation, you know, sort of a year later, where, you know, you know, more than 50% of Londoners don't trust the Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick has now finally stood down. And, yeah, CopWatch groups have sprung up across the country but across the capital as well as a means of resisting police powers, the powers they already use but also the powers proposed in the, in the, in the bill. And so, Yeah, it's been it's been a wild year. And, and yeah that's that's the context and community organizing in.

SAMI:

Thanks for that that's really useful and, and it feels like. Because you described it as like a, like a like a crisis for policing, not just the Met police but probably a little bit more broadly as well, like, what do you feel like it is as to why that's happening like now specifically. Like obviously you mentioned some of the reasons around, specifically the Sarah Everar vigil that ended up getting highly repressed and generated a lot of backlash for the Met from people who normally are quite pro the Met. Yeah. And, but you also mentioned, like there's been a long history of other kinds of organizing and campaigning around like police violence and state violence so like, do you feel like there were other reasons around like the now, specifically as to like, why this feels like more exploitable now? Like one thing that comes to my mind is obviously like there's been a lot more focus in the last few years around like groups talking about like abolition and things like that after like some of the like Black Lives Matter uprisings and things like that, like, what do you do you feel like there are other like things that have led to this point, that feel worth mentioning.

AVIAH:

Yes. I mean, the interesting thing is that so myself, and another comrade from Sisters and CopWatch are currently writing a book about abolitionist politics for the British context. And when we started writing that book was, well, the first sort of like you know proposal was being put together like just before the pandemic hit. And that was very much like kind of like, all we need to make an argument as to why abolition should be taken up by the left in Britain.