Last night @slcpd sent out a huge team of riot cops to disperse protestors. They shot rubber bullets, charged the crowd, beat people with batons, broke bones and sent unarmed protestors to the hospital. It was terrifying. They don't serve and protect us. https://www.facebook.com/madalena.mcneil/videos/10216299087740820/

I woke up this morning covered in bruises and scrapes from being repeatedly brutalized by police, and compared to how they treated other people, they were gentle with me. Every injury I got was because I tried to protect other people from their violence. https://twitter.com/lanavanna/status/1281422764033945600?s=20

I really want to stress how GENTLE they tried to be with me, and they still beat the crap out of me. One time while charging, they actually tried to avoid me and went for my friends on either side. They clearly didn't want to be seen hurting me and but couldn't help themselves.

I am so fucking exhausted that it's hard to be articulate right now but I want to talk about this, because it's fucking important. We have to put ourselves on the line. The police are not there to keep us safe, they are there to protect buildings, roads, and property.

It's ass-backwards that protestors are so often painted as bloodthirsty and out of control, when the police are the ones doing the brutalization. We couldn't hurt them if we tried. But they had no problem hurting us, and they wanted to do more.

If you haven't watched this, please do. You can hear people (mostly me lol) screaming for them to stop, to leave people alone, and they don't, they just keep coming. They don't check if anyone is okay -- we checked on each other. They didn't care about us. https://www.facebook.com/madalena.mcneil/videos/10216299087740820/

They charged us at least three times, maybe four, while we *begged* them to stop. Those shields HURT and they used them to maul people. They beat the shit out of us with half a dozen vans in the background, ready to take us to jail for the crime of standing in the street.

When you're recording the police kicking the shit out of you and your friends, you tend to want to hang on to your phone. It should give you an idea of the force they used that my phone flew out of my hand and landed ten feet away, on the police side of the line.

They also BACK UP before they charge a crowd, like a line of angry bulls. They literally might as well be pawing the ground. All so they can brutalize a group of unarmed teenagers and 20-somethings in t-shirts holding paper signs.

When they arrested a protestor, they lured him in by asking to "talk to him for a minute" before putting him in cuffs. I tried to intervene and they slammed me to the ground, hit me on the head with a baton, and shoved me again once I got back up. https://twitter.com/lanavanna/status/1281422764033945600?s=20

You can see in the video that I struggled to stand back up. I was exhausted from carrying around water, trying to keep people together, and getting shit-kicked by cops. Ten minutes later I almost passed out on the street while we were waiting for a ride. They don't care.

This is another video where you can see how clearly @slcpd escalated the situation. We were standing there. You can also hear me screaming at them about my phone (lol) so when we got charged these two times, they had come at us at least 2-3 times already. https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1281434273459900418?s=20

I was there last night as a mutual aid volunteer. I've been with the #JusticeForBernardo movement coordinating the mutual aid efforts since the beginning, and I've seen how fucking hard Sofia and the other organizers work to keep people safe. THEY care about safety, not the cops.

Last night was the result of years of trauma and terror inflicted on our communities by police. Bernardo's murder brought it to a head -- and not even his murder, but the way the DA rubbed everyone's faces in the dirt and denied even a shadow of justice. Yesterday was different.

You can't oppress and torment people for generations and not expect them to rise up -- especially if you're going to behave the way Sim Gill did yesterday, providing a detailed justification for why a 22 year old deserved to be shot 15+ times in the back.

And this is where the other really important thing I want to say comes in -- white people. We have to do this shit. They do NOT want to hurt us, especially white women, especially young white women who look like their daughters. We have to be out there on the frontlines.

I'm sharing all this about last night not because I got the worst of it (I didn't) or because the movement is about me (it's not) but because I really need folks to understand that it's terrifying and dangerous to put yourself on the line and we have to do it anyway.

Every protest I make a point to put myself next to or in front of the organizers of color police are targeting, and every time you can see them hesitate. They try to reason with me, tell me to stay out of it, avoid hitting me, because they serve whiteness and power, not people.