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Title: Scout Schultz: Remembering Means Fighting Author: CrimethInc. Date: October 5, 2017 Language: en Topics: death, obituary, queer anarchism, police brutality, Atlanta, students, revolt Source: Retrieved on 23rd April 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2017/10/05/scout-schultz-remembering-means-fighting-mourning-a-queer-activist-and-anarchist-murdered-by-the-police
On September 16, anarchist, anti-fascist, engineering student, and queer
activist Scout Schultz was shot and killed by police on Georgia Tech
campus in Midtown Atlanta. This loss has shaken Scout’s friends and
family and terrorized many others, including activists, queer youth, and
those with mental health concerns across campus and the city at large.
Two weeks after Scout’s murder, Scout’s lover and close friend Dallas
Punja took their own life. (Both Scout and Dallas used they/them
pronouns.) Dallas described being traumatized by police sirens and
police lights after Scout’s killing. These two tragic deaths drive home
what is at stake in the conflict that pits anarchists and queer youth
against police and the repressive society they uphold: it is a question
of survival itself.
In the following account, we analyze the strategies that the authorities
and their flunkies are using to suppress the reaction to Scout’s murder.
The forces of order aim to punish the students and anyone else thought
to have participated in the rebellion that took place on the Georgia
Tech campus two days after Scout was killed. The long-term goal is more
ambitious: they want to make revolt unthinkable, rendering us morally
incapable of responding appropriately to the murders and oppression they
inflict on us. This is not about the machinations of police and
bureaucrats on a single campus, but an entire repressive society.
These reflections are dedicated to angry, scared, and desperate people
everywhere. Even if we haven’t met you yet, we care about you. The first
and most important thing you can do to help create a better world is to
survive. Thank you for everything you’ve done to survive until now,
whatever you had to do. Let’s find each other and create a world without
police or homophobia, in which education is not a commodity and human
life is not held cheap.
On September 16, a phone call was made to the Georgia Tech Police
Department describing a “man [sic] with long hair, carrying what appears
to be a knife and maybe a gun.” Later, the Georgia Bureau of
Investigation would claim that it was Scout who made this call.
Around midnight, four Georgia Tech police officers encountered Scout,
who was walking barefoot and carrying a small multi-tool. In a video
posted online, Scout yells at the officers to shoot, and they oblige.
Scout is shot in the heart and dies. Suicide notes were found in Scout’s
apartment. This immediately became important for the repressive
strategy, as the police, administration, and many students began to
deploy the narrative of “suicide by cop,” reframing Scout as the
attacker and the police as the true victims.
The following Monday, September 18, hundreds of students, workers,
faculty, and bereaved friends gathered at the Kessler Campanile at
Georgia Tech to hold a vigil for Scout. Many young people were crying
and holding candles. It quickly became clear that this vigil was also a
part of the repressive strategy, as administrators and student
bureaucrats refused to allow Scout’s closest friends to speak. The event
became a photo opportunity for an administration determined to conceal
Scout’s death beneath a veneer of unity and campus pride.
After twenty minutes, the event managers declared that the vigil was
over. Many people in the crowd were confused, others angry. A large
section of the crowd began yelling about the police, the underfunded
counseling facilities, the toxic culture of campus life. Around 100
people departed from the vigil, most donning masks, and confronted the
police outside of GTPD headquarters. There, police attacked the
procession and were attacked in return. In the ensuing melee, the police
arrested three people and beat many more; a police cruiser was set on
fire. The arrestees were charged with felonies and the corporate media
posted their mugshots on television and internet outlets.
The following morning, the Georgia Tech Marksman Club was already
present on campus with tables and chalk. Their signs read “We Love You
GTPD” and similar messages. They encouraged students to chalk positive
messages to the police on the sidewalk. Online, a fundraiser was
launched for the police department, which raised nearly twice as much
money as the fundraiser for the arrestees. T-shirts reading “I <3 GTPD”
began selling.
The campus administrators deployed a disingenuous discourse about
“outside agitators,” anarchists, and anti-fascists who had invaded the
campus intent on destruction. This justified the mass deployment of
alerts and emails to faculty and students framing what had occurred and
an intense militarization of campus as police, federal agents,
undercover officers, and helicopters encircled the area for the rest of
the week.
Starting immediately, the neo-fascist organization Identity Evropa
resumed “#ProjectSeige,” posting stickers and posters around campus and
the surrounding areas, ostensibly hoping to utilize the outrage drummed
up by GTPD and campus administration as a recruitment opportunity. This
symbiotic relationship between the administration, the police, and an
explicitly white supremacist organization is worth noting.
On the Georgia Tech subReddit, a popular online forum for students and
faculty alike, the discourses of police, campus liberals, and neo-Nazis
commingled. “Suicide by cop” and “anti-antifa” rhetoric went uncontested
for days.
The Daily Caller, a far-right news website run by Fox News’ Tucker
Carlson, argued that the revolt on campus did not in fact emerge from
outsiders, but from the student body itself. Some sections of the far
right are interested in fostering the perception that universities
across the country are developing an insurgent left-wing culture,
typified by the anti-fascist revolts at UC Berkeley. The strategy behind
this argument is to plant the idea that in order to defend the “American
way of life,” it is necessary to crack down on student organizing groups
and supposedly liberal educators and curricula.
Several left-wing and progressive student groups discreetly distanced
themselves from any proportional response to Scout’s murder, submitting
paltry demands to the administration. Many members of these groups are
well-meaning, but any willingness to collaborate with administrators and
police will be used to pathologize those who refuse to collaborate,
enabling the authorities to portray them as unreasonable, dangerous, and
possibly insane.
On Friday, September 22, when a small group of Scout’s friends attempted
to hold a vigil and sit-in at the counseling center, police shut down
the campus. Classes and interviews were canceled, helicopters circled
overhead, and administrators encouraged teachers to cancel classes,
claiming falsely that “antifa” was going to start a riot. Instead,
undercover police attempted to intimidate the crowd while right-wing
students yelled “Harambe” jokes at mourners—an alt-right racist dog
whistle referring to a gorilla shot and killed when a child entered its
enclosure.
In the days following the revolt, GTPD began posting blurry photos on
their Twitter feed of alleged participants. Nearly all of those pictured
were black and many of the pictures seemed useless apart from fostering
the impression that the crowd was composed predominantly of non-students
and “outsiders.” At the same time, campus police directed students to
Leedir.com where they could anonymously submit footage and photos of the
event.
On September 27, an interdepartmental operation took place in which APD,
GSUPD, and GTPD arrested a Georgia State University student on charges
of misdemeanor inciting a riot for allegedly participating in the
previous week’s demonstration. Two days later, on September 29, another
GSU student was pulled from class and given identical charges. On
October 2, a third GSU student was arrested.
The GT administration and police department hope to round up as many
participants in the September 18 demonstration as they can. Regardless
of whether these charges stick, they aim to create a chilling effect on
the GT campus and potentially on college campuses across the country.
The administrators want their police to be able to kill a student on
campus without any scandal erupting. This is unprecedented in recent US
history, but the norm in places like Indonesia and Belarus. Now, they
are arresting non-students to play on the fanatical micro-nationalism
they have cultivated on campus, which they previously used to
rationalize the brutal gentrification of the Home Park neighborhood
where GT is located.
The administration on campus and the police have been using LiveSafe and
Leedir, two tech startups, to facilitate the repressive process.
The administrators are encouraging students, faculty, and campus police
to use the LiveSafe platform. According to their website, “students,
faculty, and staff are deputized to provide crowdsourced intelligence,
while campus security can send mass emergency notifications through
LiveSafe’s easily integrated command dashboard.” With this tool, the
authorities were able to instruct students to return to their dorm rooms
and stay off campus, insisting that a “violent protest” was underway and
students were in danger. Across campus, young people could be seen
either flocking to the sight of the burning car, or running fearfully to
their rooms or cars. In this way, an informal curfew was enforced.
Since then, the authorities have been able to use LiveSafe to draw
potential snitches to their other tool of choice: Leedir.
Leedir is a tool developed by CitizenGlobal, an LA tech startup whose
claim to fame is using this technology to coordinate data analysis in
the wake of the Boston Marathon Bombing and to repress young people in
Santa Barbara for revolting against the police during Deltopia in 2014.
Leedir enables a client such as GTPD to refine the data aggregated from
social media posts, news articles, online videos and photography, CCTV
footage, and anonymously submitted media. Where LiveSafe deputizes
individuals directly, hoping to transform everyone into a cop, Leedir
weaponizes the data produced even by unwilling collaborators, gathering
data and collecting submissions to host “in the cloud” using Amazon Web
Services. A few years ago, when campus unrest erupted in Keene, NH,
Leedir was used to make 25 additional arrests.
In the weeks following the revolt, a clear picture is beginning to
emerge about the “outsiders” that the administration and police are
seeking out.
The outsiders are black people. Georgia Tech has already pushed the
black population out of Home Park in its attempts to compete with
Georgia State and other campuses to gentrify downtown.
The outsiders are queer. Student representatives, administration,
neo-fascists, and good liberals have all claimed that it was “outsiders”
who started the revolt following the vigil on September 18 and who
invaded campus again that Friday for a vigil. The march was led by
gender-queer and non-binary youth behind a “DEFEND LGBTIA” banner. Are
these people not allowed to react to the execution of their friend?
The outsiders are “crazy.” Online and in official statements to the
press, students and authorities have relentlessly argued that Scout’s
suicidal demeanor justified their execution. For them, this simple
reality closes the book on the incident and anyone who says otherwise is
either opportunistically attacking the engineering school or is simply
another crazy person in need of a reality check.
The outsiders are anarchists and anti-fascists. Identity Evropa, the GT
Marksman Club, GTPD, and the school president were quick to blame
anarchists and anti-fascists for the burning of the cruiser and the
clashes with police. Liberals and progressive groups have echoed their
claims. Is it true that only those without any political convictions
have a right to enter Georgia Tech campus?
The outsiders are service workers, unemployed people, homeless people,
manual laborers, and single parents. Many GT students aspire to work for
weapons manufacturers or technology companies. Their insistence that
demonstrators have come from “outside campus” has cultural connotations:
now that GT is so expensive, and the adjacent neighborhood so
gentrified, and the campus culture so passive and reactionary, it must
be the plebian elements in the city at large or even from the suburbs
who caused the violence.
In a sense, all this is true. Now that the factories on Howell Mill have
been transformed into luxury condos, the manufacturing facilities in
Mechanicsville are rotting empty, and public housing is shuttered, it
must be the case that many of those enraged by Scout’s murder do not
live on campus. Now that the HOPE scholarship has been gutted,
anti-immigrant laws continue to drain campuses and neighborhoods of
their diversity, and community colleges are being bought by larger
universities like GSU, it is probably true that not everyone who showed
up to grieve the loss of their friend can afford higher education.
But we cannot look to legitimizing factors like identity, neighborhood,
occupation, and the like to justify taking the sort of action that
Scout’s death demands of us to ensure that the police never dare murder
another person. The “outsiders” who stood up for Scout have justified
their own behavior rather than seeking the approval of administrators
who wish to excuse murder. It is that fact—the self-legitimizing anarchy
of those who rebel—that has made them outsiders in the eyes of
authorities who intend to dictate the discourse and monopolize the
legitimate use of force.
We have to respond to all these provocations by regaining the
initiative. Scout was an anarchist, an anti-fascist, and a queer
activist on and off campus. Only by continuing to advance a diverse and
multifaceted revolt against all the economic and police controls in this
society can we defend ourselves and each other against further
repression. When the campus administration and the Atlanta area police
are forced to respond to crises of legitimacy, finding themselves
embroiled in scandals and hostilities, they will be unable to come
knocking on our doors or drag us out of classrooms. Efforts to support
arrestees have been ongoing and organized, but they must continue until
the charges are dropped or the trials are adjourned. The bail fund must
be replenished with donations and fundraising efforts of all kinds.
Scout’s memory and the revolt taking place in Scout’s name could be used
to blackmail young people across the country into silence, serving as a
warning shot against the rebellious energy of the angry and desperate
everywhere. Or they could ignite more expressions of love and outrage,
becoming an inspiration to revolutionaries for many years. Let’s be
intelligent and creative. Rather than waiting for large crowds to join
us, we have to create the conditions in which people can come together
in mourning and courage, so that no one ever again must die like Scout,
Dallas, and all the other people killed by this homophobic, repressive
society.
Let’s get going. The past depends on it.
09.16: Scout is shot and killed by GTPD on campus.
09.18: A massive vigil gathers on campus. Following the vigil, a masked
crowd clashes with police and burns a police cruiser.
09.19: The GT Marksman club celebrates the police on campus while
administrators and police initiate a repressive campaign against the
movement. Throughout the week, the neo-fascist organization Identity
Evropa distributes posters and stickers around campus parroting the
discourse of administrators and police.
09.22: A small vigil takes place on campus, surrounded by right-wing
hecklers and militarized police. A small teach-in occurs at which
students and staff vent their frustrations. Over the weekend, a faculty
meeting with the administration explodes as teachers and staff yell at
the president and board of regents for not taking responsibility for a
student’s death.
09.27: A GSU student is arrested on campus for alleged involvement in
the vigil and subsequent demonstration. Two anonymous individuals throw
hundreds of fliers around the Georgia Tech career fair reading “We
Remember Scout Schultz—executed by GTPD” and “No Apologies” with the
image of a burning police cruiser.
09.29: A GSU student is pulled out of class and arrested by GTPD.
10.02: A third GSU student is arrested in connection with the
demonstration and vigil.