Louisville Police Are Restricting Breonna Taylor Protesters’ Right to Protest

As protests demanding justice for Breonna Taylor continue, the state is now resolving to repress them rather than meet protesters’ demands. The Louisville Police Department is effectively outlawing protest.

After 70 days of nonstop protests, police officials announced Sunday that street protests are now prohibited. Protests will now be relegated to sidewalks, and participants must obey traffic laws. This takes away almost all the power from public demonstrations and grants the police greater license to arrest protesters. More fundamentally, it undermines the democratic right of assembly.

Historically, actions such as blocking intersections, seizing bridges, and taking the streets have been used as a means of commercial and social disruption as well as directly confronting the state. The power of a demonstration is that it can halt commerce or severely hinder economic activity in a city and force the state to heed the demands of demonstrators. Aside from strikes, it is one of the most effective protest actions. It is also an inherent democratic right, even under bourgeois law. The attack on this is form of assembly illustrates that capitalism will shed its democratic mask in favor of repression to suppress the uprisings caused by the capitalist system itself.

This new state repression has been on display since these protests started. Though it doesn’t seem as if the state overall is as panicked as it was in June, when it was going as far as the shoot bourgeois reporters and pepper-spray children, this latest measure shows that Louisville’s government cannot contain the uprising it caused. It is pulling out the stops to end the calls to defend Black lives, even if it means undermining even the flawed bourgeois conception of democracy.

If protests continue and the state’s current measures cannot contain them, the state will keep changing its tactics, using harsher repression, concessions, or a mix of both.

In light of this desperate act of the state, to repress viciously and freely, it is imperative that we denounce these actions and continue to press forward — not only for our basic democratic rights but also for the complete overthrow of capitalism and an end to racism.

Black Lives Matter

Breonna Taylor

Protests

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After suspending and evicting students and ordering the repression of a student occupation, Columbia University has become the ground zero for attacks against the pro-Palestine movement. What happens at Columbia in the coming days has implications for our basic democratic rights, such as the right to protest.

Against the Criminalization of Opinion and in Defense of Our Right to Support Palestine: We Must Stand Up!

In France, the repression of Palestine supporters is escalating. A conference by La France Insoumise (LFI) has been banned; a union leader has been arrested and charged for speaking out for Palestine; court cases have increased against those who “condone terrorism”; and the state has stepped up its “anti-terrorism” efforts. In the face of all this, we must stand together.

United States