Albuquerque Police Department framed Dare to Struggle for starting a dumpster fire during our December 14th protest and ABQ Raw, notorious APD mouthpiece, ran with it. ABQ Raw added some what some call jounralistc flair (what we call lying mixed with parinoid dellousion) that the protest caused a car wreck on the same road. The protest was specifically around a homeless woman freezing to death the same night that she was sprayed with water by the AFR (Albuquerque Fire and Rescue), but generally around the mistreatment and criminalization of homeless people by the Police and Fire Department in The War Zone.
Before we had even heard about this woman freezing to death, dozens of homeless people in The Zone reported to us that not only does AFR put out homeless people’s fires overnight amid extreme temperatures, but often soaks people with water in the process. People have told us that it’s a nightly occurance for their fires to be extinguished, and they are often mocked by AFR after after the fact. One man told us they sprayed directly in his ear, and another told us they sprayed down his kid. So when we learned about this woman being sprayed down and subsquently freezing to death, we went to the The Zone to investigate and heard more testimony to AFR’s inhumane treatment of the homeless: that both this woman and her lifesaving fire were sprayed down multiple times causing her to freeze to death later that night.
At the protest, homeless people of Warzone marched up and down Central, with a stop in front of an AFR station, demanding justice and an end to inhumane treatment. While our protest was not involved in the dumster fire that APD tried to frame us for, we understand why homeless people light fires, including dumpster fires, in freezing temperatures: to stay alive. If people lit a dumpster fire at the Fire Station, as APD claims, we wouldn’t blame them for expressing their outrage at AFR mocking them, making them freeze, and contributing to the preventable death of this woman.
The Police and Fire Department are afraid of homeless people uniting to fight back against the way they are treated and criminalized, so they use tactics such as framing us and other protesters, claiming to be the victims in the situation, and denying they know anything about this woman or the spraying down of people in The Zone. People on the streets know the truth though; they experience the horrendous mistreatment and criminalization every day from the Police and AFR, and they are the actual victims of AFR and the Police’s crimes.
AFR now knows that eyes are on them, and that any mistreatment or criminalization of homeless people going forward is going to be exposed and fought back against.
ABQ Raw, who claims to be “Your Trusted News Source In Albuquerque”, is known for publishing stories solely from the police’s perspective. Trying to frame us or slander us isn’t going to work; the people on the streets know the truth. Justice for All Stolen Lives! Justice for the streets!
Dare to Struggle 