Julian Reyes of Texas and his dog Shiner Bock were brutalized by Austin’s police department 13 years ago this month. The tragic events of a single night would become the beginning of the Lizard King’s continued fight against the crimes and injustices committed by pigs every day across our city. His story and his work are marked by boldness and consistency, and we should all take note of the way he’s stood up to the bastards in blue as we continue to galvanize the struggle against police brutality across the country.
On the night of April 24th, 2013, Julian Reyes of Austin, Texas otherwise known as the Lizard King, was working on some art projects ahead of Austin’s annual Eeyore’s Birthday Party and Art Festival in Pease park. He and his dog of 9 years, Shiner, were at a storage unit in South Austin that Julian converted into his studio when at around midnight Shiner began to grow agitated. Julian heard sounds coming from outside, as did his dog, and before Julian could react Shiner ran out of the unit to investigate. In a matter of seconds, Julian heard gunshots and was being yelled at by pigs to get on the ground and identify himself at gunpoint. Shiner lay bleeding beside him.
“I definitely felt in that moment that whatever had just happened to my best friend was about to happen to me. I felt like they were going to shoot and kill me.”
The trigger happy assholes didn’t offer Julian a moment to process what was unfolding before they moved to question him.
“There was no time to ask or react to the carnage I had witnessed, in front of my eyes, in slow motion. I was in total disbelief. The officers didn’t want to talk to me and let me know why they were there and why my dog got shot. Nor would they answer questions from the onsite resident property manager.”
Only later did Julian receive a sorry for an explanation of the events that occurred that night. He was told that the pigs were on scene to investigate a strange sound reported by a neighbor, which they said was likely a piece of scrap metal flapping in the wind. When Shiner approached them, the sniveling cowards armed with Smith and Wesson handguns said they “got scared” and proceeded to open fire on a helpless dog. To add insult to injury, the cops openly expressed to Julian that it was within their right to shoot and kill his dog because they felt threatened.
Julian and Shiner’s case is a drop in a vast ocean. Every day in this country these sacks of shit with badges are given more and more money for assault weapons, militarized vehicles, and armor to prepare themselves for urban combat; you’d think they were being given prizes for all the beatings and murders they commit to maintain order. This is because they understand and are emboldened to fulfill their true mission; to protect the interests of the ruling class by any means necessary, to show the people by force exactly where they stand in American society, and to keep us from taking a stand and fighting back against the horrors we’re made to face every day. With every dollar taken from our paychecks spent to better arm the private army of the super rich, we see an increase in their readiness to commit acts of brutality against innocent black and brown people, trans people, and immigrants.
What is remarkable about Julian’s case is how he responded to this act of brutality. The traumatic events he experienced on the night of April 24th, 2013, served as the brutal spark that ignited a 13 year fight against APD and their acts of violence against the people of Austin, and that fight continues today. The Lizard King, @LizzardoGiganticus on YouTube, posted his first cop watching video on the internet on New Year’s Day 2014, and since then he’s made it his mission to face the pigs in the street regardless of where or what they’re doing to expose their crimes against the people.
Despite having been defanged and even co-opted by the pigs since its beginnings, “cop watching” has a revolutionary history. On the afternoon of September 27th, 1966, an Oakland police officer fired four shots into the back of an unarmed 16 year old black kid named Matthew Johnson. This act of brutality was the final straw for the people of Hunters Point, an impoverished food desert on the edges of a shipyard where living conditions were marked by “leaking roofs, rotten plumbing, sagging foundations, vermin, and rodents.” By 11:00 AM on September 28th, a crowd of over 700 manifested at the Bayview Community Center throwing rocks and molotov cocktails calling for Matthew Johnson’s killer to be charged with murder. The national guard was deployed and chaos ensued, at around 6:00 PM Oakland police and other “anti-riot personnel” opened fire into the Bayview Community center for 7-8 minutes while 200 children were inside. The uprising ended with no casualties among the police and no charges brought against Matthew Johnson’s killer. But this stand by the people of Hunters Point against the killing of an innocent black teenager, specifically their explosive display of power and clear demands that justice be served, is what inspired Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to organize their community in armed patrols that followed Oakland pigs around on their routes and let them know that they could just as easily be brutalized in broad daylight if they didn’t come correct. These patrols would come to bear the name Cop Watch, and their organizers (in case you didn’t already know) would become the leaders of the Black Panther Party.
Things are different now. Following a cop around while openly carrying a loaded gun and proclaiming revolutionary politics will get you killed. As with any righteous revolutionary effort, cop watching as a means to apply pressure and threaten to levy revolutionary justice against pigs for their acts of brutality has been literally disarmed. Now, cop watchers carry video cameras or cell phones instead of loaded guns. In the wake of the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, crony politicians passed police reforms and got the pigs to try and convince us they’re watching themselves with body cameras and police oversight boards. Amidst the ongoing immigration crisis, political organizations and neighborhood rapid response groups are even offering trainings on how to become a “lawful observer” to ICE activity. The term itself is packaged up in such a way that makes a “lawful observer” both just a passive observer that doesn’t do anything but look on while people are being kidnapped, terrorized, or otherwise brutalized. A “lawful observer” is lawful to the same law that recognizes and legitimizes the acts of terror and brutality that state’s pigs rain down on people. But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be on pig’s asses in the street and gathering evidence of their crimes against the people. What it does mean is that like Julian, we have to do more than stand around waiting for something to happen and then only proceed to watch when something does pop off, hoping that a video of a pig or an ICE agent committing an act of terror against us will somehow serve to change the reality of their relationship to us as oppressors. Like Julian, we need to be meeting the pigs attacks with a strong resistance, not just watching and filming but actively calling them out on the spot. We need to consistently expose these violent state sponsored thugs both in the streets and in the court room.
To begin with, Julian doesn’t just carry his phone around and wait for police activity to start filming on the sidelines. He goes out into the street looking for pigs. He knows these assholes by name and has familiarized himself with the atrocities they’ve individually committed, and he lets everyone around them in public know they’re a murderer or a rapist or a wife beater, and he blasts them all live on camera. He lets pigs know they’re not welcome in our streets and he shames them publicly by exposing them for exactly what they are. Another great example of this is when he put up “Bad Cop” posters that pictured, named, and denounced the criminal misconduct committed by specific APD pigs during Austin’s “Stop the Sweeps” movement in 2016.
For all of these reasons, he is regularly arrested by APD, for not complying with their orders to stay out of their way, for not getting on the sidewalk or leaving the premises, etc. And in doing so, he exposes the contradiction and hypocrisy of these police officers who break and bend the same laws they claim to enforce. He stands his ground and lets these pigs try him. And they do. To date, Julian has 23 cases under his belt from agitating cops, and when they railroad him with charges and offer him a plea deal as a means to silence him and fuck up his record, he doesn’t fold. He takes that shit to trial and he hasn’t lost a single case. Notably, the Lizard King recently won a bench trial case by combining the Privacy Protection Act of 1988 (PPA) with the Fifth Estate.
Three years ago Julian went out to an overbooked homeless shelter where cops were threatening to arrest homeless people gathered outside waiting for room to open up if they didn’t disperse. Julian told us that he arrived on scene and confronted the cops by saying,
“That doesn’t sound legal, that sounds like you guys are breaking the law. I explained the ‘camping law’ to them and they didn’t want to hear it, they told me to leave so I sat down and kept filming them. The officers Gadiel Alas and Corey Hale arrested me and took my filming equipment without probable cause.”
Julian was charged with interfering with an arrest which he took to trial. This is where Julian’s public defender who specialized in PPA law leveraged the relatively obscure act from 1988. The PPA has implications that do not allow law enforcement to seize media belonging to the press without probable cause, instead the government must subpoena the press entity for such material. The fifth estate is legal jargon which refers to unconventional media as a legitimate manifestation of the press. People who document things to post on the internet, for example. Together these formed the bedrock of the defense’s case that Julian went on to win, and his case is being used as judicial precedent in other places in the country to protect people that document their agitation of ICE agents or police officers with the intent to distribute their media online.
The upshot here is that by standing up to the charges brought against him and taking them to trial, over the course of 23 trials Julian has galvanized a truth through practice that many only understand theoretically: the only answer to political repression, in any of its forms, is to keep fighting back and to push harder. When cops arrest us, levy charges against us, and threaten us with jail time, its a move to try and extinguish the fire inside of us that got us to stand up, fight back, and get arrested in the first place. Large bails are meant to keep people in jails before their court dates, and the conditions inside of jails are meant to demoralize the people being held there and break them down so that they don’t keep fighting. And when the state offers plea deals to people who have sat in those jails for weeks, months, and sometimes years, they serve as a final attempt by the state to make sure that people don’t rightfully stand up for themselves. Taking a page out of Julian’s book, we must remain steadfast in our struggles with the injustice system because only then do we have the power to expose that this system’s primary purpose is to oppress us. Better yet, it’s only when we fight back that we have the power to win, and when we win, whether in their courts or in our streets, it’s a legitimate threat to those in power and their elements of repression.
Julian currently has four active cases against him, including one federal lawsuit he is pressing against the state. Most pressing is a case involving charges of criminal trespassing as a result of him filming the police in the parking lot of a motorcycle dealership. There, he was arrested by the disgraceful pig Donald Petraites. On February 16th, 2018, Petraitis and another cop Robert Pfaff brutally tased and subsequently arrested an unarmed black man, Quentin Perkins, while he was on his knees with his hands in the air. Charges of excessive force were brought against both pigs, but they were found not guilty by jury trial in December of 2018. Perkins sued and settled for $75,000 from the city in October of 2019, and Petraitis and Pfaff were placed on indefinite suspension in March of 2019. Inexplicably but not surprisingly, both cops were reinstated to the police department in May of 2020 and are currently stalking Austin’s streets. As if the fact that Petraitis is still an active duty police officer who is able to come after people like Julian for exposing police misconduct is not absurd enough, Petraitis is not being allowed to testify against Julian in court because of his history of misconduct. Instead in a sorry attempt to dig up decades of Julian’s criminal history, most of which includes charges that have long since been dropped and cases that have already been settled, the state is calling on an array of cops who have been confronted by Julian as “witnesses” that have no connection to Julian’s case of alleged criminal trespassing.
While this sounds, and is, blatantly ludicrous, the way Julian’s case of alleged criminal trespassing is being handled by the city of Austin is calculated. The injustice system here is familiar with the Lizard King, he’s made himself well known among attorneys, judges, and certainly cops. Beyond this, he’s made himself known as someone they can’t fuck with without a fight. In bodycam footage released to him as part of discovery in another case involving an act of agitation he led in front of Austin’s federal courthouse, police officers can be heard saying “if we arrest this guy, there’ll be ten more out here tomorrow.” The next move in their playbook is to push harder than just pressing charges, and instead they are attempting to smear Julian’s name and paint him as a criminal where they’ve previously failed time and time again to prove it in court.
Julian’s first court appointed attorney in this case quit on him because he wouldn’t take a plea deal, and the Austin Lawyer’s Guild has refused to offer him help citing “limited resources”. A person like Julian, who applies pressure to the system in order to expose its dysfunctions and widen the glaring cracks within it, is exactly who self proclaimed “politically conscious” lawyers and leftist organizations providing legal resources should be providing their services to. It’s Julian’s fight, and those fights like his that apply real pressure to killer pigs and crooked judges, that we need to boldly stand up behind if we are ever going to build a culture that can effectively combat repression.
From the student’s facing disciplinary actions in their schools for staging anti-ICE walkouts, to the first wave of Prairieland verdicts coming out of Dallas-Forth Worth, the importance of a collective consciousness that does not tolerate political repression at any level cannot be overstated, nor can its necessity for any revolutionary movement be any clearer. You can help fight for Julian by showing up to his upcoming court dates on 4/29/26 and 4/30/26 at Travis County Criminal Court 7 9:30am, and by financially supporting his continued fight against the brutality and injustices committed by APD financially on CashApp ($indgactivism) or Patreon (Julian Reyes). Or even by joining him in the streets, because no matter how hard the city of Austin has come down on him over the past 13 years, the Lizard King remains undefeated!
Dare to Struggle 