Asheville – The Cop Block Tour
On Sunday, Jan. 27th, 2013, I met with eight others in Asheville at Double D’s – a double-decker bus turned coffee shop where we had a good freewheeling conversation about police accountability.
As others present were involved with Asheville Anarchists and the Blue Ridge Liberty Project, which states as the first tenant of its mission “To create an environment where people from all walks of life, united by their love of liberty, can live free”, we didn’t have to spend much time delving into the concepts of self-ownership (which I believe integral for anyone who purports to work toward police accountability, see: CopBlock.org/Knowledge).
Instead, we spend time going over best-practices on how to safeguard ones rights through language (“Am I free to go?”) and technology (streaming applications) and then, if some subpar incident does occur, effective damage control.
We also exchanged literature – I parted ways with Cop Block business cards, “Warning: Police” flyers, Liberty Empowerment packets (which had been given to me by Nate Cox of Virginia Cop Block), Cop Block bumper stickers and Thin Blue Line Copblocked stickers, LRN.fm stickers, Don’t Take the Plea Deal tri-folds, Who Owns You? cards, etc. and left with small stack of tri-folds for the Blue Ridge Liberty Project.
As I neared Asheville I picked-up some bluegrass tunes, which complemented the beautiful topography:
Later, I walked around Asheville and as I expected based on my previous two times through that town, there wasn’t much police activity. Especially considering it was a Sunday evening.
Still, I did leave a couple of flyers on police cruisers and had conversations with some folks I passed on the street – as has happened elsewhere, more than one person said something to the effect of “I wish I would have had this information last year when __________ happened!”
Still, at least the information and the decentralized community and support it can bring is now better known to folks in town.
I did this quick recap the next morning when driving west in Tennessee:
