This has been going on for a while now, with no signs of it abating!

On Friday, January 31, thousands of people across New York City participated in a day of action against the police and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), under the name of FTP (fuck the police, among other things) and J31 (January 31). A coalition of groups called for the actions, including Decolonize This Place, NYC Shut it Down, Take Back the Bronx, and Why Accountability, around four demands: “cops out of the subway,” “free transit,” “end the harassment of performers and vendors,” and “full accessibility for people of varying abilities.”

The day’s events, billed as FTP 3, followed marches – FTP 1 and FTP 2 – held in previous months that kicked off after widely publicized incidents of violence and harassment by the police on the subway. This time, tactics were broadened: dispersed, autonomous actions throughout the day, followed by a mobile, disruptive convergence on the Subway in the evening.  

Friday’s demonstrations were notable for their decentralized nature and efficacy. The first FTP march was wildly successful yet still met with relatively light repression; the second was met with heavier repression. Organizers adapted their tactics this time around. They published an Operations Manual and had organizing and training meetings in the lead up, encouraging and empowering people to self-organize, spread propaganda, and conduct direct action against the police and MTA. The convergence also remixed the basic form of a protest march, instead taking to the Subway in mass fare evasion: “The Actions are the Journey,” Decolonize This Place posted.

Actions earlier in the day were broad. People were swiped into the subway at the Gun Hill Road station in the Bronx and Jamaica Center in Queens. Banners were dropped across the city, most notably inside the Oculus, a $4 billion transit-hub-cum-shopping-mall. People posted and passed out propaganda inside the Bronx courthouse. A rally was held on the step street on W 167 between Shakespeare and Anderson Avenues, that has become known as the “Joker Stairs” after a movie drawing tourists to them, against the police and the gentrification and tourism they enable. Students and supporters gathered outside the Department of Education rallied for the demands of the day and extended them to schools: cops out, tuition free. Most commonly, people locked or zip-tied emergency exit doors open throughout the subway system, making fare evasion easier and more accessible, and spread propaganda graffiti throughout the city. 

In addition, the day was preceded by weeks of heavy propaganda posting to promote the action and its goals, from the small scale to the replacement of advertisements at bus shelters.

At 5:00 p.m. over a thousand people gathered inside Grand Central Terminal, which has often been a hub of demonstrations in New York since the Black Lives Matter uprising in late 2014, that followed the non-indictment of Former New York Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who killed Eric Garner in July of that year. The state came seemingly prepared: the entire station was surrounded by barricades and filled with NYPD, MTA Police, and Department of Homeland Security personnel. A conventional march wasn’t the plan, though: almost immediately, the crowd swarmed into the Subway at Grand Central and nearby stations, making for Restoration Plaza, a public space in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Along the way, the demonstration held space on the trains and applied even more graffiti across the Subway system.

At Restoration Plaza, the demonstrators rallied, then marched some around Bedford-Stuyvesant. Later, most of the demonstrators got back on the train in another mass fare evasion and headed to 1 Police Plaza, the NYPD’s headquarters building, to wait for the release of and support their comrades being held there. In total, 45 demonstrators were arrested.

#FTP protesters are trying to get on the train to get to the next location but the anti-protest NYPD Strategic Response Group (SRG) is being violent as usual. The cops have already been brutal tonite & are specifically blocking protesters from getting on any train in the area. pic.twitter.com/xGGnWTKOF0

— Ash J (@AshAgony) February 1, 2020

“FTP IS NOT AN EVENT… ITS THE NEW STATUS QUO. ITS THE BEGINNING” posted Take Back the Bronx on Instagram. MTL+, “a collective of organizers, artists, and writers that facilitates the work of Decolonize This Place,” wrote ahead of the action that “Becoming ungovernable” – a phrase often used by Decolonize this Place – “names the moment when people cross a threshold of freedom, lose fear, and begin to embrace their collective potentials of both refusal and creation… It points to reclaiming the city, site by site and block by block, in advance of the further crises that are on the horizon.” In the FTP formation – decentralized, creative, disruptive – one can see this beginning to take form. The tactics employed by thousands on January 31 can be employed autonomously and anywhere and everywhere by thousands and even millions more – indeed, many of them were inspired by past and contemporary struggles elsewhere – and surely no one is stopping here.