Image credit: Mo C., Instagram: @mo.crone

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Strategy for the Student Divestment Movement

The University of Wisconsin holds investments in numerous companies and index funds which are directly complicit in the genocide of Palestinians and almost a century of Israeli apartheid. The student movement has diligently fought for divestment from these companies to strangle funding for the genocide at its source: the United States. 

On May 1st 2024, 34 protesters were brutalized and arrested by university police after staging an encampment on UW ground. The police forcefully dismantled the encampment and enacted violence on students sharing their voice. University leadership responded by claiming it did support free expression, but only within “the boundaries of law and campus policies.” We were asked the age-old question, previously answered in 1969 during the Black Student Strike: “why not try the proper channels?” 

Because, time and time again, our struggle is rejected and mocked. UW leadership acts as if these students had a choice in the matter. We have tried the ‘proper channels’ and they did not lead to divestment. They did not work because proper channels are a misdirection created by those in power to distract and dispel collective power.

In order to cut the arteries that supply blood to the imperialist monstrosity responsible for this genocide, we must go beyond proper channels and directly confront the source of university complicity: the pursuit of profit.

I. Background: Settler-colonialism, imperialism, & Palestine

Israel is a settler-colonial project. The Zionists did not come peacefully or as migrants, they came as settlers who moved to the land of Palestine from across the world to inhabit land which was already home to Palestinians. They expelled Palestinians from their homes in order to expand “their own” territory. They began a regime which exploits Palestinians, treats them as legally inferior, and completely blocks their freedom of movement. They began a genocide. This is the project of Zionism, which has taken place since the 1940s. 

The goal of Zionism is to build an explicitly Jewish State in the land of Palestine and the surrounding area. What they are trying to build is an ethnostate- one which oppresses and cleanses groups which do not fit into the dominant ethnicity. Israel strictly upholds the privilege and power of the dominant ethnicity by disposing of the oppressed, enforced by strict law and military might. When Zionists claim that Israel should exist because it is “the only Jewish State”, they are defending an ethnostate, the same type of state Adolf Hitler wanted to build for the “Aryan race” in Europe. This must not be allowed to continue. 

To defeat Zionism, we must first understand what it isn’t. It is necessary to decouple Judaism from Zionism. While ethnic and religious Judaism are both identities which are dominant in Israel, Israel is not a Jewish project. It is the product of an ideology: Zionism. Ethnostates are ethnostates regardless of who creates them. Israel could just as easily call itself a state for any other group and our opposition to it would be identical because we do not oppose Jewish people, but an ideological foundation.

Only a fraction of Jewish people claim Israel as a state which represents them. No state can represent the entirety of an ethnic or religious group. Believing so completely disregards the individual autonomy of Jewish people. There are many anti-Zionist Jewish people worldwide fighting for the liberation of Palestine. A majority of Jewish people live outside of Israel. Many have never been to Israel and never will be. States do not act as conduits to which an entire ethnic group funnels their wants and needs, states represent a ruling class which operates in its own interest. 

Tying Zionism to Judaism is disingenuous and disgusting. Opposing Zionism is opposing a fascist ideology, not Jewish people. It is ridiculous for Zionists to base their “supremacy” on religious doctrine or a past of facing oppression. These are not excuses for oppression and mass murder. 

Zionist claims to supremacy are not ideas cast out into the ether, but fascist convictions meticulously enacted in the material world. To understand the self-evident evil of this regime, we must examine the conditions in Palestine.

Israel continues to expand its settlements into the West Bank pushing more and more Palestinians off of their land. Gaza has turned from an open air ghetto to an extermination camp. Prior to October 7th, Israel had already worked to guarantee unlivable conditions in Gaza. The Palestinians are prisoners to the walls and checkpoints Israel has built around them, restricting their movement. Israel completely controls the flow of trade and shipment in and out of Gaza. They maintain a selective blockade. Palestinians who work outside of this ghetto must pass through military checkpoints coming to and from work. Palestinians are subjected to an unequal and discriminatory legal system. This constitutes apartheid, which South Africa has been keen to point out for many years.  These conditions are violent, oppressive, and unacceptable. 

Palestinians have pursued the “proper channels” of change for almost a century and their calls fall of deaf ears. When they initiated the great march of return, a peaceful mass protest with the goal of crossing the walls of their enclosure, they were gunned down by Israel without hesitation. A peaceful protest became a massacre. 

When Palestinians resist militarily in an uprising, it is depicted as terrorism and undue violence rather than a necessity in the decolonial struggle, the only way to shatter the chains the colonizer imposed. It is called terrorism rather than defensive action when taking up the gun to disarm the aggressor. Let us recall the holocaust and its own Warsaw ghetto uprising and we will see the historical double standard which denounces Palestinian resistance but not that of the prisoners of the Warsaw ghetto.

Israel and the Israeli Occupying Force have conducted a genocide against the Palestinian people, killing by any means. After the Oct. 7 uprising, Israel quickly bombed many hospitals in Gaza. Israel immediately cut off food, water, and electricity– ignoring the most basic of human rights to collectively punish Palestinians. Now, the IOF has killed over 75,000 people. A massive portion of these are women and children. Pre-war, the population of Gaza was ~2,260,000. That is about one of every 30 people killed. Israel does not have a “right to defend itself.” It is a settler-colonial ethnostate committing genocide. Nothing it has ever done to the Palestinian people can be classified as “self defense.” Likewise, no foreign arms sent to Israel can be classified as “allied defense” because there is nothing defensive in any motivation for alliance with Israel. The extensive collaboration of the United States in this genocidal project is direct evidence.

Every massacre we witness would be impossible without full bipartisan involvement from the US. It is an active participant because of the profit and strategic benefits Israel provides. The primary interest of the US government on the world stage is domination, exploitation, and profit. As a capitalist state obediently follows the profit motive, it seeks to expand and oppress outside of the bounds of its own territory. Capitalism becomes imperialism: violently oppressing foreigners, outsourcing manufacturing and resource extraction which directly serve US companies, and minimizing the wages paid to workers. US companies and government are one in the same. 

Liberal democracy exclusively represents the interests of the owning class because officials work for their donors, not their constituents. Officials and political parties rule by their own interest because they too profit from maintaining the current systems of oppression. Hundreds of times, the US government initiated war and regime change worldwide to ensure access to cheap resources and labor. 

The United States wants Israel to exist in the Middle East to exert its will and pressure, maintaining a claim on oil. Oil is extremely valuable to all industries and it is so plentiful in the Middle East that the US had fought for control over the region for decades. The result is death, destruction, and imperial blowback. Israel is more than just an ally to the US, it is an imperial outpost. 

From Israel, the US demonstrates its military dominance. About 70% of Israel’s weaponry comes from the United States. Much of this is not purchased but given directly to Israel. Over $20 billion of military aid had been provided to Israel by the US since Oct 7, 2023. Our taxes are funding this genocide, which would be impossible without US support. Both entrenched political parties have demonstrated their full commitment to Israel and its actions. For most US politicians of either party, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and war profiteering companies are generous donors. The United States is the pinnacle of imperialism, and it leaps to support its genocidal compatriot without hesitation. 

Gaza has become an open testing ground for surveillance and military technology which the United States builds and supplies. US weapons manufacturers endlessly profit from this genocide and decades of militarized apartheid. These war profiteers are contracted by the US and Israeli governments to provide guns, bombs, drones, tracking and data processing. When states engage in conflict, involved companies and their investors profit profusely. War profiteers are active participants in this genocide. Finally, we have arrived at UW-Madison’s connection to the genocide of Palestinians. The University of Wisconsin profits from genocide with large investments in index funds, containing the aforementioned war profiteers. When these companies profit, the UW Board of Regents profit. They refuse to divest from Israel for this reason.

II. We have tried

For years, we have attempted to bring the University of Wisconsin to divest from companies which bring apartheid and genocide against Palestinians. We have fought for even one soul on the Board of Regents to see the reality caused by their investment in war profiteers, surveillance tech, and border walls. The Regents, the Chancellor, and the Dean of Students have rejected our pleas for sensible divestment and reinvestment of funds in companies that do not bathe in blood. We have given maximum lenience in that while exploitation is the direct aim and result of capitalism, we have sought out to indicate only the most violent targets for divestment. The university does not listen. 

We have tried the proper channels.

We have sent our letters and held our protests respecting the university’s restrictive guidelines on speech. We have had our teach-ins, our vigils, and our marches. We have stood outside in the blistering heat and the freezing cold. We have requested divestment at ASM Open Forums and stood by at Board of Regents meetings, begging for any change in course. We have been ignored, berated, and brutalized all the while. 

Only when we were pushed into a corner did we disrupt order. We shouted loudly so that the campus could no longer feign ignorance to the brutality. We held an encampment on Library Mall. We later addressed the Board of Regents directly, demanding they hear our voices. 

Again, and again, and again, we are ignored and brushed away. 

Chancellor Mnookin gave us excuses, shallow lies to hide her inaction and her complicity. She told us that we did not understand, that she had no power over the Board of Regents Trust Fund or the UW Foundation. She shifted blame and ignored the power of her own voice. She refused to exert any pressure. She refused to facilitate any discussion. 

The university commits itself to “maintaining neutrality” but the neutral stance between liberation and genocide is complicity in that genocide. The university remains idle while sending money to heartless mass murderers. They act as if we can’t see them patting those mass murderers on the back, telling them “good job” every time they shoot a Palestinian child. To Mnookin, to our incoming Chancellor Eric Wilcots, and to the Board of Regents: you have the power to stop at least part of the killing. The power to TRY – but you choose the opposite of love. You choose indifference.

In response to our calls, the Board of Regents and the Chancellor have sicced UWPD on us, reacting in violence to our demands for peace and divestment.

As of yet, we have been unable to enact change. We have not cleared the threshold at which the song of the masses overcomes the malice of those in power.

The university administration’s greed and class interest are too overwhelming. Each child massacred in Gaza is another golden coin tossed atop the Regents’ vast riches. Each gun in the hand of settler-colonialist occupying forces adds to the market value of war profiteers, and finds its way back to the administration through their myriad entangled investments.

The “Proper Channels” are glorified forms of begging. They are pursued in hope that a large enough or loud enough group of students might change administration’s minds, enacting justice through words alone. This is a fantasy, not a path to change.  UW administration won’t divest if we “just ask politely.” Money made from the suffering of Palestinians speaks far louder than we can because that profit is the primary motivator for administrators. It is what they seek to gain from their position. Nothing we do can overwrite that. A group with a class interest opposed to justice and strictly built on exploitation will not heed our begging.

III “Proper Channels”: an Establishment Lie

The “proper channels” were created by those in power to serve their own interest. They were not meant to be a valid path to change, but a diversion. 

To the university, the “proper channels” are adherence to their expressive activity policy and exercising our voice via student council and “shared governance.” The expressive activity policy is written to excessively limit where, when, and how students can protest. The policy has been altered several times to further restrict student speech, a move which disgusts us and has drawn the ire of the ACLU. It prevents us from having large signs or speaking out within 25 feet of a university building. It prevents us from expressing ourselves indoors and from speaking too loudly. 

It explicitly bans anything disruptive because disruption means we cannot be ignored. Disruption means the university’s principal functions – those which bring it profit and status – are briefly blocked. Any protest which is effective at exerting pressure must be disruptive, because as long as university administration can turn a blind eye and receive no consequences, that is the path they will always take. 

Student government acts as another diversion. On paper, it was created “to give students a voice” but functionally it cannot. ASM has very little structural power, and what little power it did have was significantly limited by Scott Walker. Today ASM is nothing but an advisory body other than the SSFC, which manages Segregated Fees and, due to Act 55, SSFC only manages a tiny portion of those fees which are deemed “allocable.” The rest must be approved by the university.

Any resolution passed by ASM can be brushed away as easily as a bread crumb. The university has repeatedly demonstrated their disregard for ASM, and while many members of ASM are fighting for divestment from within, ultimately university administration has the final say. 

On Wednesday, March 25th 2026, a collective of student organizations and ASM representatives presented the case for divestment before the student council. This resolution passed with immense support, demanding the university divest from discriminatory practices such as apartheid, genocide, and militarized violence, from fossil fule corporations, from border walls and surveillance. When our resolution passed, it was dismissed, degraded, and ignored by the university.

Nowhere else are the contradictions of reform from within a rigged system so clear as in student government. Corporations and lobbyists render systemic change from within liberal democracy impossible, but there is still room for band-aids to the horrors of capitalism and imperialism. “Surface modifications of the old society” are still possible even if revolution is not. Even surface modifications are impossible in student government. Here, the scale of power weighs completely towards the oppressor. Students have no power for band-aids, let alone real solutions. Administration offers us a “proper channel” which cannot be considered a channel at all. It is a dead end.

The situation we are presented with leaves us no room to dwell on student government. For that matter, the actions of our university leave us no room to consider any of the “proper channels” we are so often told to use. A brief list of these actions is more than enough proof:

1. The University of Wisconsin pours money into entities that directly profit from and propagate the genocide of Palestinians via the UW System Trust Fund, making the university complicit in genocide.
2. The University of Wisconsin accepts donations from the UW Foundation, which gave $456 million to the UW in 2024, and refuses to publicly disclose its investments.
3. UW-Madison has repeatedly altered its expressive activity and chalking policies to limit students’ free speech and expression, regardless of constitutionality. 
4. During the Spring 2024 encampment, Chancellor Mnookin authorized a violent police raid of peaceful student protestors.
5. After the encampment, student organizers met with university administration to ask questions regarding divestment and issue demands. The university brushed the demands off and offered no answers.
6. During a Board of Regents meeting last semester, some organizers interrupted proceedings to plead their case. Once again, UWPD reacted with violence.
7. When confronted directly about divestment during the ASM Open Forum on October 8th 2025, Chancellor Mnookin told concerned attendees that the university was not looking to divest and that she, the top authority at UW-Madison besides the Regents, held no power over what the university does and does not invest in. When it was offered that she could speak up, use her voice, or refuse to take money from the Trust Fund or UW Foundation, she left the room.
8. On March 25th, 2026, ASM passed a resolution calling for divestment. The university disregarded the resolution despite strong community support and legal basis.

Therefore, we reject institutionalist insistence on use of “proper channels”, or working from within a system which is rigged against us. We reject the mentality that we must limit our voices against genocide, humanity’s most horrific crime. The liberal political framework relies on existing institutions as the beginning and end of political action. This framework reinforces the view that working within the “rules,” arbitrary restrictions meant to suppress speech, is the only acceptable method of change. This is the viewpoint of university administration, which positions them fundamentally against social change. 

However, with our work in ASM and community organizing, we can gain wide support, teach the community and build solidarity. When university administrators ignore ASM and when they ignore the growing community, they practically insist we, the entire campus community, take up a disruptive approach. 

In order for us to come to the conclusion that “proper channels” must be bypassed, we spent years exhausting each and every one, keeping hope that we might be mistaken and that someone might have the decency to enact divestment. Our hope has betrayed us.

IV. Beyond “Proper Channels”

When we diminish our organizational capacity to what the owning class refer to as the “proper channels,” the confined and bureaucratic methods of change, we are giving in to them. We are taking the bait. “Institutional change” is a fantasy. “Proper channels” are not designed for change, they are designed to divert our attention.

Our support for Palestinians must not be superficial. When we call for liberation without substantive action, we disrespect the corpses of thousands of Palestinians killed day by day. It is our duty in the imperial core to work just as diligently, just as militantly, as the Palestinians who now directly face genocide. The safety we feel in our own homes is built on the great imperial lie. Our “success” and “development” are built on the suffering of others abroad just as the profits of the owning class are built on our suffering as workers. 

We can’t ignore that those in power are also using Palestine as a testing ground for their tactics of oppression here. What we see across the globe will come back to us, and if we do not fight now, we will be wholly unprepared when we see the final form of violence enacted upon us.

Understand the suffering of our comrades overseas and let it guide our work here. Have empathy. Let us direct our efforts to collective power which cannot only topple those who oppress us, but those who oppress the rest of the world as well. 

We need a path to change which is both effective and independent of reliance on ineffective institutions. We advocate for politics of the people and for the people. Power that grows from organized communities with a collective goal who are not afraid to take change into their own hands, rejecting false representation in favor of direct participation.

Free from the chains of “proper channels,” we may explore an array of avenues for change. We may vote 1 day of the year but we must organize direct action, disruption, and strikes to enact our collective power for the other 364.

“They have withdrawn their power as wealth producers… and they are going to coerce you by this withdrawal of their power into granting their demands… [accomplishing] what tears and pleadings never could have accomplished”

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, International Workers of the World

This is the nature of a strike. Withdraw production so an employer cannot profit, as workers produce all wealth. Similarly, student strikes and extended disruptions force the university’s functions to cease. The university makes its profits by tuition, donations, and investments. When the university fears a loss of student recruitment, alumni donations, academic reputation, and when classes and administrative meetings are halted, the Board of Regents will be forced to divest from genocide or lose some form of profit. When students and alumni can’t be recruited for their money, when the university can’t fulfil its basic purpose, to sell classes and manufactured community, administrators will look for a path to reclaim it. The only path we will leave for them is giving in to our demands.

However, there are some strategies we must avoid. Individual acts will not lead to divestment. Destroying imperial infrastructure is not an individual act, but a collective one. Even if one artery of the imperial heart is severed, it takes far more to completely shut it down. It takes far more to build a community that will last beyond one struggle to fight for the liberation of all people, that won’t allow one form of oppression to be replaced by another. We want to build lasting, genuinely democratic social power.

“The total collapse of this society would provide no guarantee about what replaced it. Unless a majority of people had the ideas and organization sufficient for the creation of an alternative society, we would see the old world reassert itself because it is what people would be used to.” 

You can’t blow up a social relationship, by Libertarian Socialist Organisation

UW-Madison’s contributions to genocide will only be thwarted by a mass movement. Therefore, we must engage in organizing so that we can form a community with the ability to engage in collective action. Advocacy and mobilizing existing members are helpful, but alone they are ineffective. We must make a constant effort to outreach to the Madison community, hear their thoughts, and build them into active participants in the fight, growing the movement. A small group of us may be targeted, doxxed and expelled. A mass movement renders this impossible. The university can’t get rid of a large part of their student body without losing more than it would from divestment.

Together we must pursue action which cuts the flow of wealth from students and faculty to administrators, breaking down imperial infrastructure from within. When we do this, the profiteers will come to us begging: because their class motive relies on the continuation of our labor, our tuition, and a positive image to attract new students and donations which we implicitly provide. When community power prevents this, the university must answer to that community. 

None of us can make this happen alone. We need to gather our friends, classmates, and co-workers together. We need to discuss and determine the best path to change- be that an encampment, a student strike or something else entirely. We must examine the history of divestment efforts including the successful divestment from South African apartheid and divestment of other campuses to determine what has and hasn’t worked. We must explore all avenues of change and implement them until one is effective. 

“Power won’t move unless we strike fear into the heart of the ruling class and pose a threat to their reproduction of capital.”

Flood the Gates: Escalate, by Palestine Action US

There is no wrong way to protest against genocide.

There is no wrong way to protest against apartheid. 

There is no wrong way to protest against civilians being bombed.

There is no wrong way to protest against cities turned to dust.

There is no wrong way to protest the legislated subservience of one group to another.

There is no wrong way to protest the usage of taxpayer dollars or university funds for this brutality.

There is no wrong way to protest the UN’s inaction and betrayal of the maxim “never again.”

This article was inspired by a flier created by the Wisconsin Student Association in support of the 1969 Black Student Strike.

Recently, I attended a talk by an employee of a major AI company about work they were doing with the island nation of Tuvalu to help Tuvalu become the world’s “first digital nation.” Because of its extremely low elevation (4.6 m or ~15 ft at highest elevation), the island nation has been quite vocal about climate change-induced sea level rise and its impact on their land. For example, one of the videos shown during the talk was of an island chief standing in ocean water, pleading for the world to act on mitigating climate change.

Tuvalu has a long way to go before it becomes a digital nation, however. During the talk, we learned that the island nation currently does not even use digital spreadsheets, and data is entered into spreadsheets by government employees by hand on ruler-drawn paper. The Internet is available on the islands but only at certain times of the day and it is mostly used for entertainment.

Another challenge is that most of the people of Tuvalu don’t see the need to update to the latest technology. When casually asked about AI by employees of the partner company, many of them just responded, “What is the point?”  This is not to say that there was no interest in AI. After all, the Tuvaluan government is working with U.S. tech companies to digitize the nation. The local attitude toward AI, however, is a largely practical one. Tuvaluans want to use AI to improve government administration, education, and the quality of life on the islands. AI and other digital tech do not seem to be transforming their everyday lives in the same way that it is in the United States. For example, Tuvaluans still have most of their conversations with humans and generate their own written content without outsourcing it to AI.

The focus on AI for human development in Tuvalu is common, though not uniform, across the Global South, including in Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. At a related event, I talked to a former tech worker from Silicon Valley who now builds houses in Puerto Rico. When I asked them about how they saw the adoption of emerging technologies in Puerto Rico and where it would go, they responded that technology like AI is largely behind the scenes. Human relationships are in the foreground, while the Internet (being used to answer homework questions or for enjoying TikTok before bed) is in the background.

The increasingly dominant narrative in contemporary Western and other Global North conversations around tech is that technological development will lead to increasing alienation as large corporations and authoritarian governments use advanced digital technology to surveil their citizens and keep them distracted. This is also seen as a prelude to the emergence of posthuman superintelligences that will enslave or wipe out humanity. This vision of the future is described in the cyberpunk science fiction genre. 

A counter-narrative to grim cyberpunk scenarios is the solarpunk genre, where technology–such as robotics, cybernetics, and biotechnology–is used in a way that integrates humans with each other and nature. Cities are decked with vegetation and powered by renewable energy, and robots are used to free humans of repetitive labor so they can spend more time building relationships, creating art, and being in nature. Another feature of solarpunk fiction is that advanced technology is behind the scenes. The environment tends to look fairly low tech, despite being potentially much more advanced than the modern day. For example, it might look indistinguishable from a rural village apart from the massive solar panels or the humanoid robot walking by. Examples of this genre include Becky Chambers’s novels Psalm for the Wild-Built, Prayer of the Crown Shy, and Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. 

This raises an interesting question. Could a solarpunk-like scenario emerge from the Global South? Currently, the vast majority of AI development is done in the Global North and in countries like China, but it is also not clear how long this rapid development is sustainable with the increasing need for data centers and its strain on both water supplies and critical mineral supplies. 

If Global North economies were to hit the infrastructural and supply chain limits of AI development, strategic social activism could force a shift to a slower development of AI focused on artificial narrow intelligence or narrow AI. Narrow AI is trained for specific tasks, like drug discovery or environmental monitoring. These smaller, task specific models are more likely to provide direct benefits to people while being more environmentally sustainable and without the risk of replacing or wiping out humanity, as is the case with artificial general intelligence (AGI). Focus on narrow AI for specific beneficial tasks would also be resistance to the current race for AGI happening among a few U.S. companies and possibly between the United States. and China. 

Currently, the part of the world most likely to focus on narrow AI is the European Union with its AI regulatory regime. The EU has been criticized by AI advocates in the United States as being too slow. While the European approach has its shortcomings, it is an example of an AI regulatory regime that has the potential to develop AI in a way that still is safe and benefits humanity and the planet. 

This may also be a viable path for countries of the Global South. European AI development is currently dependent on U.S. Big Tech in critical ways because most of the European AI applications are dependent on U.S. models and cloud infrastructure. On the other hand, much of the Global South is yet to develop AI infrastructure. This may provide fertile ground for developing models from scratch that represent a resistance to AI capitalism driving the development of U.S. and Chinese models. I talked to at least one group doing this in Lebanon. 

Despite their potential usefulness and the likely sincerity of the good intentions of their creators (at least in the case of Anthropic), centralized U.S. models like chatGPT or Claude are trained to produce capital for investors, not to benefit humanity or the planet. A coordination of smaller models built around specific social needs rather than profit, and owned by communities or by a network of smaller socially-oriented companies, or perhaps individually owned, might be a way to create an AI-powered future that also resists capitalism. This would of course require a specific set of values to be trained into such models. This is where religions common in the Global South, such as Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, could play a role.

Although other religions have resources for developing counternarratives to AI capitalism, my background is in Christianity, so I will focus there. The recent papal encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and liberation theology are specific examples of theological roadmaps to provide motivation for an alternative, liberatory pathway for technological development. Liberation theology has inspired revolutionary movements in Latin America, such as the early Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Interestingly enough, there have also been attempts to develop a liberation theology specific to the Pacific Islands, which is directly relevant to the predominantly Christian nation of Tuvalu. 

Could liberation theology inspire a similar revolutionary movement in the realm of technological development where oppressed and marginalized people are able to use technology to improve their situation? Technology that works for integral human liberation where each community implements technology enabling their own liberation would be consistent with the pope’s vision of communities working together to each build their own section of the walls of Jerusalem.

The post Solarpunk, Liberation Theology, and the Future of the Global South  appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

The Class podcast features a socialist in office (SIO), a socialist candidate, and a political theorist on the benefits and limits of using elections to communicate with and organize the working class.

The post Is participation in elections the road to socialism? appeared first on Democratic Left.

The post Statement on Patriot Front Marching in DC appeared first on Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America.

A member of Southwest Michigan DSA reports on a strike at American Axle, a GM supplier. Workers sacrificed to keep the auto industry solvent after ’08 — sacrifices only now being clawed back from their now-profitable employers.

The post Strike Secures $30 by ’30 appeared first on Democratic Left.

DSA SF unequivocally condemns the police violence directed at our fellow San Franciscans in the LGBTQIA+ community this past Pride weekend. Thousands gathered for San Francisco’s Trans March to celebrate trans joy and stand in defense of trans lives amid escalating attacks on our communities locally and nationwide. The march was met with police violence as San Francisco Police Department officers rushed into the crowd, assaulted participants, and carried out arrests, turning a celebration of liberation into a stark reminder of ongoing state repression.

The police violence did not end there. Similar acts of intimidation and force were deployed at a queer SOMA block party on Saturday as well as outside of the Pride celebration at Civic Center on Sunday. The actions of the SFPD, including pointing so-called “non-lethal” weapons at attendees of peaceful gatherings, and repeatedly escalating situations through overwhelming shows of force, prove that they are more interested in intimidating our communities than protecting them.

It is important for us to forcefully affirm our unwavering solidarity with the movement for LGBTQIA+ liberation and the fight for trans rights as well as to stand against police brutality and all other forms of state repression.

The violence the SFPD unleashed over Pride Weekend was no miscalculation. Like all capitalist state violence, it served to defend property, preserve the existing social order, and intimidate radical working-class communities. The alleged justification for this escalation was property damage, yet the overwhelming display of armed force was directed at people peacefully celebrating Pride, exposing a system that repeatedly chooses repression over care. This is what years of rewarding police violence with expanding budgets, political cover, and unconditional institutional support produce: an emboldened force in tactical gear marching into our communities, shouting “whose streets?” while attempting to crush the radical spirit that Pride has embodied since its inception. We reaffirm our commitment to dismantling the capitalist system that has terrorized queer communities for generations, because true liberation cannot coexist with institutions built to suppress it.

San Francisco’s queer and trans liberation movement was forged in resistance to police violence. Nearly sixty years ago, trans women, drag queens, and other members of San Francisco’s LGBTQIA+  community fought back against police harassment during the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in the Tenderloin, an uprising that helped lay the foundation for the modern movement for transgender liberation. Today, the building that once housed Compton’s is owned by the GEO Group and operates as a private detention facility, a reminder that systems of state repression do not disappear on their own. 

State repression will never extinguish our commitment to justice, collective liberation, and the rights of marginalized communities to organize, march, and exist free from violence. Pride was born from political resistance against state violence, and we stand firmly in solidarity with that tradition. Our liberation has always been won through collective struggle, not granted from above. 

We invite everyone outraged by the violence of this weekend to organize with us, not only to respond to this moment, but to build the political movement that will ensure it does not happen again.

Join DSA.

The sometimes overlooked stories of members of the Communist Party USA have lessons to teach the U.S. Left

The post Celebrating Red Lives appeared first on Democratic Left.

By: Reid J

DEDHAM – In September 2025, broke and desperate, I was running food deliveries for the richest neighborhoods in Waltham while trying to get my resumé in the door anywhere and everywhere when Best Buy hired me. A friend was already working there and helped me get on the sales team with a recommendation, so that I started work full time two months before their Black Friday rush. I had never worked in sales before, barely even worked retail, but this was my last stop on a year long train of unemployment. 

It was not my plan to try to unionize my workplace of 72 employees over the coming months.

My first jolt of inspiration was sent directly into my signal DMs. Travis, the managing editor of Working Mass, asked me if I could finish an article for the paper. I replied that my focus was currently dedicated to Best Buy. I wanted a good foundation here since I was fired from the last two jobs I had. Without missing a beat, he asked me a simple question that kicked off my path to organizing:

You got an organizing plan with EWOC yet?

EWOC: the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a co-venture of DSA and the UE, to support new organizing. There was something about how he phrased it, like it was an already forgone conclusion that if I was working and not searching like so many comrades in the barren wasteland of Trump’s job market, I would already be hard at work building the foundation of the socialist future as a rank-and-file worker. The mode of thinking changed my whole attitude about my time there. I shouldn’t just wallow in gratitude that a corporation had decided to give me a meagerly-above-minimum-wage job. I should look to seek something more, no matter where I am in life.

This question stuck with me while I spent eight hours a day ringing out PlayStations and selling credit cards to senior citizens. I was here, I was employed, I had my parents off my back (still living at home), but I was making money. That’s all a man needs, right? Dutiful employment? But Travis was asking me about something more, about having a goal, a horizon at the end of a weekly forty hour cycle where I could look back at the time I’ve spent at 700 Providence Highway and say that I’d accomplished something more than sales numbers and a 3% annual pay raise.

I began, from a place inside myself where I knew in order to keep working monotonous, mind-numbing retail shifts, that I wanted either an exit strategy like everyone else I was working with, or a project I could commit myself to. I figured why not undermine some authority, spend some time talking to the people I spend eight hours with, and learn just how much they hated their job and more importantly, the company that employed them.

The American retail coworker relationship is mostly defined by a sequence of nods, fist bumps, and “thank yous” after completing a task together. Outside of this, you’ll have a handful of two to three minute interactions when not burdened by customers, daily tasks, or supervisors requesting your presence. My job was to distill the incredibly complicated and controversial idea of union labor into a digestible pitch and intake their opinion in the brief opportunities I had. I never had any training for being an organizer, I had never even worked in sales before I started the job, but I threw myself at every opportunity I saw, catching my coworkers in the break room, in our warehouse, and sometimes even running across the football field sized parking lot to introduce myself, my ideas, and whether they could see themselves fighting for better pay and benefits like the rest of us. 

My progress was staggering given my inexperience, and I quickly found momentum in every department of the store, kids fresh out of college and tenured full timers, everyone agreed with the core of my message: something has to change. 

Union Organizer, the Quality Employee?

My greatest weapon in my crusade to reach all 65 of my union eligible coworkers was a crusade to become the most well-liked guy in the store, for both my fellow hourly employees and the store’s managers. It wasn’t part of my grand strategy to end up as one of the top sales advisors in the store, but it came naturally from a desire to keep my employment secure after my last two failed attempts. 

This gave me two benefits in my endeavor: it insulated myself from targeting by management based on my performance, and created real magnetic power with my coworkers to convince them of the power of our labor. The power to say to your fellow sales advisors that you rang out $200,000 of product during the Black Friday sale was pivotal to demonstrate to my coworkers how critical their labor is to the company’s operation. 

Many of my coworkers didn’t need anything explained to them, and enthusiastically joined my cause as an outlet against the company that had underpaid them, undersupported them, and fired and rehired them at the corporation’s convenience. Although some were concerned about retaliation from a company that has historically created presentations about union busting tactics for internal use.

This was less of an obstacle for the majority of the retail personnel entering the workplace, many of whom live with others like their guardians while running DoorDash orders, fighting for credit cards and memberships. Kids like me who have nothing to lose and everything to gain often already are looking to jump to the next non-minimum wage opportunity they have before them – a pattern of instability.

As many people that jumped to my side in my support, there was still a fear among some of the workers that the workers would face retaliation following hallway meetings and parking lot sprint downs. Whether due to Best Buy’s faux-pleasant corporate approach to union-busting or because of my managers disinterest in firing their most reliable revenue driver, I was not the target of any visible interference from the company. 

The Limited Resources of the Labor Movement

The ecosystem of Best Buy relies on a steady flow of part-timers who work for months at the store, usually during the holidays, get burnt out, quit, and then are replaced by new part-timers. This is not only a foundational aspect of Best Buy’s retail structure, but a common destabilizing underpinning of global labor markets. The not-so-veiled threat behind every new hire in the store is the idea that your labor is replaceable to the corporation, whether you’ve just been put on or are a twenty year veteran, you can be cut if the numbers don’t align in your favor. Best Buy pretends and posits itself as a “people-centered” corporation, using faux-pleasantries and corporate jargon to navigate their vile practices of cutting labor at the expense of working class people and the convenience of a multi-billion dollar corporation. 

This phenomenon was always going to be the biggest challenge to an organic labor movement with a modern retail environment; the turnover rate is the company’s greatest weapon against organization, and the structure of the work is designed to leverage that advantage to their benefit as often as possible. The store employs just enough workers so that if you decide to call out from work, you’re not hurting the company, you’re only hurting your coworkers.

This is why when I started getting word from my union supporters that they’d started looking for other jobs and were putting in their two weeks, I knew that this was it. There wasn’t any more time to waste. I had built up my support, and it was time to call my organizer to request to make the campaign public, to push our strategic advantage based on momentum. A week passed after my phone call, before the union replied: “Dedham Best Buy’s union campaign is not viable for the local’s support.”

My first reaction was frustration and anger — all the effort and risk of organizing a workplace of around 70 employees, just to face a rebuke that felt like communication that the work was meaningless and was not deserving of formal support from the local. In a labor movement allergic to moves short of the 70% threshold prepared for union-busting, the unions seemed unwilling to support a campaign with support enough for a majority election at a major retail storefront. But in the coming weeks with the changes I began to see at my work, I started to see the larger context.

My organizer explained the monumentality of any union embracing a campaign like ours, with a company that had international reach and resources. In essence, the campaign was huge — it would not mean a quick or easy victory. He impressed upon me the nature of the interconnected ecosystem of union labor battles, that when one front suffers, resources from every part of the union are drained – as one example, the organizer pointed to the REI union negotiations that the company has dragged out for the last four years, which have created a black hole of sunken resources and energy. Especially now, even international unions take great pause when looking at another potential slugfest with corporate giants like Best Buy.

This is where I began to doubt my own self-assured confidence. Maybe these organizers who had been unionizing since before I was born knew more about how this was going to shake out than I did. If I thought the waiting between weeks for union communications was bad now, I wouldn’t be ready when our campaign has to be put in stasis during NLRB filings, or negotiations, or even strikes. My coworkers and I could be sparing ourselves from locking into a death grip with a company that has more time, money and employees than anyone on our side. 

An obstacle to unionization that I never anticipated is federal interference in filing for a union election. The current administration has gutted the National Labor Relations Board and brought union elections and proceedings to an effective standstill. Our filing for recognition, separate from even the company’s objections and interference, could be stalled for years in legal proceedings, while Best Buy simply waits for every member of the store to filter out in the inevitable turnover that would erode the union’s support.

The most depressing thought of all was doubt: whether anything above mattered in the real world of fighting for union labor. Even if we did everything right, played by the rules and waited our turn to get the recognition we deserve as workers, the company would likely break the rules as they always do. They could hire strikebreakers, stall and delay as long as they want, and in the end if they have the most resources and the most sway with whatever biased, Trump-appointed judge our case appears in front of, they can rule against our union.

With this framing in mind, it’s easier to understand the unquantifiable risk associated with throwing the full weight of a union against a hideously anti-worker company of the techno-feudal age. I wasn’t any happier about it, but the experience underscored the importance of every arena opened between capital and labor, and how different organizers may hold different situated knowledge of our fight, from the unionists with decades of experiencew to radicalized minimum wage workers like me.

Corporate Executives Panic Over Worker Demands

Within the next week, the store responded to our union-building efforts in a series of workplace changes.

First, they raised pay for every worker in the store, about $1.50 per hour, then for the rest of the district as well. Then came the parade of maintenance workers and exterminators to fix our long-neglected break room and rat infestation. And innocently, in the middle of all these changes, our store manager began meeting with every willing employee to begin the anti-union training. These were hostage meetings: our workers had the option of sitting in the comfy chairs of the office for 20 or 30 minutes and listening to propaganda from the company or to continue working their shift. 

This exposed Best Buy’s incredible fear of a unionized store to myself and my fellow workers. If they were confident that a union couldn’t happen in their backyard, they would not spend the money to give a hybrid distribution center on the side of the highway the attention they were. Flying consultants and company faces from Minnesota and relenting ever so slightly on a pay increase and better working conditions, two of our store’s most core demands. This showed to my coworkers and I that our demands were not only reasonable, but very easily able to be fulfilled by the company with little effort.

The current state of our campaign is relatively subdued, with numerous workforce changes and faces leaving the building and new ones being hired on, as the moment of potential momentum decreased and the boss neutralized key demands from above. Overwhelmingly among my lessons has been how to not take “no” for an answer. When discussing the nature of labor organizing with my coordinators at both unions, they agreed that persistence is the most critical skill to possess when you are taking on the task of organizing labor. You must not be afraid to embarrass yourself, or make a situation awkward, when what you are pursuing is an increase to the standard of working and living for your coworkers and yourself.

Regardless of external support or lack thereof, there is proof out there: with enough organization, the giant will blink.

Reid J is a union organizer and contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post Notes from Organizing a Union at Best Buy appeared first on Working Mass.

Events & Actions

Tuesday July 7 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Social Housing Working Group (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday July 8 (6:45 PM – 9:00 PM) DSA SF General Meeting (zoom and in person at Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)

Thursday July 9 (6:30 PM – 7:30 PM) Public Bank Project Meeting (zoom)

Thursday July 9 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) Emergency Planning(1916 McAllister St)

Friday July 10 (9:30 AM – 10:30 AM) District 1 Coffee with Comrades (2 Clement St)

Saturday July 11 (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM) No Appetite for Apartheid: Consumer Pledge Canvass (Dolores Park)

Sunday July 12 (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle Working Group (zoom)

Monday July 13 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle (Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)

Monday July 13 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Labor Board Meeting – Existing Union Support (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday July 14 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday July 14 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing (1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday July 15 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) What Is DSA? (1916 McAllister St)

Thursday July 16 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) Education Board Open Meeting (zoom)

Thursday July 16 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Immigrant Justice Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday July 18 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) HWG Food Service (Castro St & Market St)

Sunday July 19 (3:30 PM – 5:00 PM) Understanding Socialism with DSA SF (1916 McAllister St)

Monday July 20 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Monday July 20 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Labor Board – Flex Meeting (zoom)

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.

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Consumer canvass for No Appetite for Apartheid

Come out to the next consumer canvass for No Appetite for Apartheid; a boycott campaign to deshelve Israeli products from San Francisco stores which financially contribute to/perpetuate genocide and apartheid! We will be walking around Dolores Park on Saturday, July 11 from 11am – 1pm, to gather signatures from consumers who want to go apartheid-free!

Hope to see you there! RSVP here or in the QR code on the poster.

FREE PALESTINE 

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EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing Course

Sign up here!

EWOC holds a regular training course to help you build your union from the ground up alongside workers in your industry. It doesn’t require an organizing background to understand the material, which covers topics including mapping and charting, building an organizing committee, uniting over common concerns, and how to take action. If you’re interested in becoming any level of organizer for EWOC, this course is mandatory.

This course will in person at the DSA office (1916 McAllister). We’ll watch the EWOC lecture together and then go through the discussion activities. If you can’t make all of the sessions, reach out to Caitlin Stanton (SF EWOC local lead coordinator) for accommodations.

SCHEDULE:
Week 1: Developing Leadership
Tuesday, July 14 (7-8:30PM)

Week 2: The Organizing Conversation
Tuesday, July 21 (7-8:30PM)

Week 3: The Arc of the Campaign
Tuesday, July 28 (7-8:30PM)

Week 4: Inoculation and the Boss Campaign
Tuesday, August 4 (7-8:30PM)

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Understanding socialism group reading & discussion

When: Wednesday, July 19th, 3:30-5PM
Where: 1916 McAllister St

Join DSA SF’s Education Board for a group reading of excerpts from “The Long Transition Towards Socialism”. We’ll be examining what makes capitalism as a system function, its inherent contradictions, and how the transition to socialism can be achieved within those conditions.

No advance reading required! We’ll provide everything at the event

When: Wednesday, July 19th, 3:30-5PM
Where: 1916 McAllister St

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 Socialist Shop Talk

Come chat with comrades about socialism through the lens of current events! In this new series, we will read a short text together, then discuss and analyze it from a socialist point of view.

This is a low-key environment where comrades can develop their skills of applying socialist analysis to current events, while having an outlet to discuss and process everything that’s happening in the world together. This event is open to all, whether you’re socialism-curious, new to DSA, or a longtime member.

In this post-primary election session, we’ll discuss an article written by a DSA SF comrade discussing the role of electoral politics in progressing toward and winning socialism.

When: Wednesday, July 22nd, 7-9PM
Where: 1916 McAllister St
RSVP to come! 

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Reportback: Social housing on the ballot in November

Last week, we submitted over 20,000 signatures to get the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act on the November 2026 ballot!
This measure will dedicate existing revenue from the city’s Prop I transfer tax — a tax passed in 2020 on ultra-luxury real estate deals over $10 million — to fund social and affordable housing along with eviction defense.
Join the fight, help us win in November: fairhousingsf.com/get-involved

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Reportback: Solidarity rally

Last Friday, as many as 100 people rallied to show solidarity with immigrants in detention centers at Delaney Hall in New Jersey and Adelanto here in California who went on hunger strike to demand their freedom while protesting substandard living conditions, including lack of medical care and inedible food. GEO Group, the billion dollar corporation that runs both detention centers, also runs a so-called “re-entry facility” in the heart of the Tenderloin at the site of the Compton Cafeteria riots, the first documented uprising against police violence by the trans community in the U.S. DSA SF, alongside our partners at the Compton X Coalition and AROC Action, organized the rally to show support for hunger strikers’ demands while telling GEO Group that they aren’t welcome in our city.

Adam Rouhiainen is on the Red Madison Editorial Board.

Throughout Milwaukee, dozens of solar-powered cameras mounted on the side of the road record the license plate numbers, make and model, and unique features of every vehicle that passes by it. The data from these automated license plate readers (ALPRs) is streamed to and stored by a private company, Flock Safety, who puts it into a searchable database, with access given to law enforcement agencies around the country. In March 2025, Milwaukee Police Officer Josue Ayala got busy, searching the database 179 times over the next two months for just two different vehicles.

Meanwhile, possibly by chance, Officer Ayala’s girlfriend at the time looked up her license plate number on haveibeenflocked.com; what she found was that “J. Aya” searched the Flock database for her license plate number over 100 times. The reason listed for these searches? “Investigation.”

According to the criminal complaint charging him with Attempted Misconduct in Public Office, Ayala made 124 license plate searches on his girlfriend’s vehicle, and another 55 searches on his ex’s. Both victims filed restraining orders; Ayala’s now ex-girlfriend wrote, “I was horrified, disgusted, embarrassed and terrified.” The second victim wrote, “When Ayala was using the Flock system repeatedly to stalk me via MPD resources, I feared for my safety.”

Milwaukee Police Department’s investigation into Officer Ayala began only after one of his victims searched for their own license plate on an activist website.

On May 7 of this year, The Milwaukee Police Department presented ALPR auditing guidelines. Each license plate search, and each officer’s searches, will be tested on a monthly basis for statistical outliers. This new auditing system, reducing the number of officers who have access to the Flock database down from 370 to 100, and the national news of Ayala’s misuse of Flock, was not enough to deter a second Milwaukee police officer from misusing the technology. Milwaukee Police Department Chief of Staff Heather Hough revealed this second instance of Flock misuse at the May 7 Fire and Police Commission meeting, saying, “There is an investigation pending, but I cannot disclose any other information at this time.”

MPD Chief of Staff Heather Hough discloses that a second Milwaukee officer is being investigated for ALPR misuse

Ayala ended up pleading guilty to a Class A misdemeanor, never having to deal with felony stalking charges. Menasha Police Officer Cristian Morales was not so lucky. On January 7 of this year, the Appleton Police Department arrested Officer Morales for stalking, a Class I felony. Their press release lacks any details on what Morales actually did, but a criminal complaint says Morales used the Flock network to search for his now ex-girlfriend’s vehicle 5 times in October 2025. He listed the reason for his searches as “welfare.” Morales’s ex-girlfriend wrote “I am concerned for my personal safety” in a petition for a restraining order.

These Milwaukee and Menasha/Appleton incidents of police misuse of ALPRs were ultimately disclosed to the public in some form by the police departments themselves. The Kenosha County Sheriff Department has been much more silent about their ALPR misuse incident. An open records request by the Wisconsin Examiner show Kenosha County sheriff’s deputy Frank McGrath made 16 Flock searches on a vehicle owned by another deputy. Why? From the Examiner’s analysis of the records they obtained, “McGrath was apparently stalking another Kenosha County deputy whom he was dating.” McGrath was offered a severance package to resign; he has not been charged with a crime.

Security issues involving government use of intelligence to spy on a love interest are not a new concept; the NSA even coined the term LOVINT since at least 2013 to describe such issues occurring in their agency. How has Wisconsin prepared for the age of fast and efficient image detection?

Wisconsin has no statewide oversight on local police’s use of ALPRs. By default, Flock stores all collected data for 30 days. The previously mentioned cases of police misconduct show that this is not nearly a small enough window of time to prevent bad actors in the government from infringing on people’s privacy. In contrast, New Hampshire must delete all ALPR data within 3 minutes of collection if there is no investigation hit.

Over 200 police forces across Wisconsin have contracts with Flock; some have auditing guidelines, as we saw in Milwaukee, and some have no publicly stated policy at all.

One of those 200 used to be the Dane County Sheriff. Some time in late 2022, the Dane County Sheriff began a pilot program of 26 Flock cameras. The County Board officially approved $80,000 in funding for Flock ALPRs in 2023. After a dozen MADSA members and other privacy advocates showed up to the April 20, 2026 Board meeting to speak against Flock, County Board voted to end their Flock contract by May 1.

Victory was short lived, because on June 4, the County Board held a vote to reinstate the $80,000 for a different ALPR network. MADSA members showed up again to speak against police surveillance networks. Is the Dane County Board of Supervisors aware of the aforementioned ALPR security issues we’ve seen, just in Wisconsin? I spoke at the June 4 County Board Meeting to make sure they were, reading off each of the previous four Wisconsin love interest spying cases. I also argued that any ALPR network, not just Flock, could be abused by individual officers.

Dane County Supervisors speaking against ALPRs included MADSA member Aria Trucios and MADSA-endorsed Heidi Wegleitner. On the capitalist incentives that private surveillance companies have when working with law enforcement, Supervisor Trucios argued, “The profit motive necessarily will push companies to seek as much profit out of that as possible, and the best way to seek that profit is by finding ways to aggregate that data, even if you anonymize it, share it with other partners, sell it off to other partners.”

Speaking about basic privacy and potential Fourth Amendment violations, Trucios continues: “It would be feasible that a federal agency would step in and say actually this is a matter of national security that we have a dragnet ability to track anybody within the U.S. at any time… I don’t believe that we should be privatizing our way around the Fourth Amendment. I don’t think our citizens and residents should be paying to create this dragnet automated tracking system.” On how this type of technology is still untested in the U.S. court system, they add, “Would we want to be the institution that’s on the hook?”

Dane County Supervisors Trucios and Wegleitner explain the issues with ALPR networks

Supervisor Wegleitner spoke about overpolicing communities of color. “I think the amount of surveillance we have all around us over the last 40 years also coincides with mass incarceration in this country and real harm inflicted on black and brown communities… Instead of law enforcement reacting to criminal behavior based on individualized suspicion, we have massive data networks and predictive data tracking and technology being funneled to law enforcement to try to intervene, to more closely monitor, to further overpolice and surveil communities that have always, consistently been harmed by law enforcement activities, that have disproportionate contact with the criminal legal system, that are disproportionally sitting in our jail right now, in our prisons. This automatic license plate reader system takes us further down that path.” Hinting at the security lapses we’ve seen with Flock, Wegleitner argues, “We don’t have the capacity of this Board and our committees to ensure this won’t be used for harm… I don’t see how a system like this could not be used for harm.”

At this June 4 meeting, the Board voted 26 to 7 to restore the $80,000 to the Sheriff for a new ALPR system “with enhanced privacy, security, transparency, and data control safeguards.”

Meanwhile, Flock cameras are still active throughout the Madison Area. Even though Dane County will be using a new ALPR provider, and Madison Police have never had a contract with Flock, four Flock cameras are located on the Capitol square as contracted with the State, UW-Madison has several Flock cameras throughout campus strategically pointed at crowded roads, and Maple Bluff has about a dozen.

ALPRs have reached the attention of only one candidate in the Wisconsin Governor’s race. In her AI policy, Francesca Hong singles out Flock specifically, demanding an “open-source, independently audited, and not controlled by a private vendor with a financial interest in its continued use.” Add a narrow data retention window, and we might be getting somewhere. No other candidate for Governor has Flock, ALPRs, or police surveillance policies on their website. This is particularly telling for Milwaukee County Executive and gubernatorial candidate David Crowley, who has seemingly made no recent statements in regards to the current debate over Flock in Milwaukee.

Even if the Wisconsin state government fails to regulate the various police forces across the state, we have various tools for more direct action. The site haveibeenflocked.com was used by the Josue Ayala’s victim to start that investigation. An open records request by the Wisconsin Examiner uncovered the Kenosha County Sheriff Department’s lack of action regarding their deputy’s misuse of Flock. DSA chapters, privacy advocates, and abolitionist groups are speaking out against Flock, and Fitchburg, Monona, Verona, UW-Police, and Dane County have all ended or are in the process of ending their Flock contracts. Even though Flock has earned the majority of recent attention on ALPR misuse, any brand of ALPR network recording every vehicle passing by its cameras and storing it into a searchable database is poised for misuse and violates our basic privacy rights.