Cindy Milstein (they) on Nostr: A few years ago, my dear friend @sl0wriot asked if he could borrow some of the many ...

A few years ago, my dear friend @sl0wriot asked if he could borrow some of the many (many!) photos I’d taken of #ACAB sightings in the wild over the years, on the streets of many a city built on the bones of stolen lands and stolen lives. He wanted to use a variety of them on a page in his forthcoming book, which now has been in print for a few years. The collection of essays and images, which I highly recommend reading if you’re an anarchist—even if you think you aren’t interested in design—is titled “Design Against Design: Cause and Consequence of a Dissident Graphic Practice,” written and designed by Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, and published by @setmargins. If memory serves, numerous ones of my pictures of others’ ACAB street art accompany an essay related to exploring the power of asserting in writing, anywhere and everywhere, that “all cops are bad/bastards/brutal.”

Of course, on their own, four letters scrawled on walls, sidewalks, dumpsters, and the like won’t abolish police and policing. Yet it’s the repetition—ad nauseam and in your face—that when combined with social conditions and social struggles, becomes the fertile ground for social outcry, uprising, and potentially transition. One needs to repeatedly, continuously cultivate the soil, so that when cops are particularly cruel and murderous, and of late, their actions are caught on film from multiple angles and shared widely on social media, there’s already numerous “post-it notes” of sorts in people’s minds and hearts. Even if on the subconscious level, they remember seeing lots of public notices that all cops are indeed barbaric.

All the more reason, I’d contend, to make the already-ubiquitous “ACAB” tags, stencils, stickers, and so on, even more prominent across the landscape—if only to make police feel uncomfortable no matter where they go, seeing how much everybody (or most people) hate the police.

Here, I’m sharing just a small, small fraction of the many ACAB photos still buried in my unshared collection of them. These were taken over the past several years in various cities, large and smaller: Montreal, Asheville (NC), Madison (WI), Lansing (MI), New York, Vienna, and Athens.