The Five Assumptions: Police Abolition and Safety at George Floyd Square

• In Event: 41014 - Cop Cities and Abolition: Law and Order Backlash Politics and Urban Resistance

Abstract

On May 25, 2020, four Minneapolis police officers lynched George Floyd, setting off the largest and most diverse social movements in U.S. history. In the nearly five years since, a group of activists occupying the space where Floyd was killed have settled on goals and logics that are consistent with abolition as a political philosophy. Abolitionism consists of dismantling oppressive institutions and practices while simultaneously creating and extending liberatory ones (Du Bois 1935; Davis 2005). Collective action taking place daily at George Floyd Square (GFS), gives researchers a rare opportunity to empirically observe how abolition is a practical and instantiated paradigm. Relying on interviews with more than fifty activists at GFS and nearly five years of ethnographic and visual data, I find that the protest occupation at GFS has been sustained through clear abolitionist logics and methods that are reflected in five core assumptions. Those five assumptions are: (1) assume everyone has COVID; (2) assume everyone is armed; (3) assume everything you say and do is being recorded; (4) assume not everyone has your idea of liberation in mind; (5) assume everyone has experienced trauma that has made them a little crazy. These assumptions, and the calls to action that each one carries, are essential for achieving local activists’ definitions of safety and justice.

Author

• Anna DalCortivo, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities