This May Day night, two groups of anarchists in Tucson attacked law enforcement targets in solidarity with the ongoing rebellions against police throughout the country. First, the office of the Combined Law Enforcement Association of Arizona, a statewide association of police unions, had a number of its windows smashed out. Later, the office of the Tucson Border Patrol Local Union also lost a number of windows and was redecorated with no borders slogans.

Border Patrol was targeted for their role in the ongoing occupation of indigenous lands, their contribution to countless deaths and untold suffering in the desert south of Tucson and elsewhere, and constantly increasing militarization of border communities across the borderlands. Borders cannot be reformed, they must be abolished.

The police union was targeted for being a police union. We aim for the abolition of the police and take particular umbrage with the notion that cops are workers. The central role of the police is control of working people and the maintenance of white supremacy. We also find value in targeting representatives of the Tucson Police Department since the chief is now part of a federal task force on improving relations between police and the populations they try to manage. Villasenor is adept at pushing a “community policing” agenda as part of a counterinsurgency strategy to better control potentially rebellious populations and incorporate the official Left into this system of domination. This insidious strategy is more difficult to counter than the overt brutality of say, Joe Arpaio, but no less violent – the role of all police remains the same.

In this moment, as fierce revolts against the police and white supremacy are spreading across the country, it is impossible to assert that “not all cops are bad” or that they’re “part of the 99%.” Those who suggest these things, or that the police can be reformed, are not naive or misguided – they have chosen a side. They’ve sided with white supremacy, with state violence, with capital, with order. Considering this, our actions are intended to push for more and broader struggle for the absolute abolition of the police and nothing less.

For the rebels in Baltimore, Iguala, Ferguson and everywhere.
For everyone they’ve taken from us, whether by murder, deportation, or incarceration.
For open revolt against the police and against borders.

http://anarchistnews.org/content/police-and-border-patrol-unions-attacked-tucson