Monica Trinidad: We Charge Genocide is an intergenerational grassroots effort challenging police violence in Chicago. It started about a year ago, around now, June 6th is the anniversary. It started around a young person named Dominique Franklin who was a young, Black man who was killed by Chicago police for stealing a bottle of vodka at a Walgreens in Old Town—a pretty affluent area. Cops chased him down and tased him while he was handcuffed. And then he hit his head on a light pole, went into a coma and passed away a few days later.

Mariame Kaba who is this prolific, amazing, revolutionary Black woman in Chicago started tons of organizing efforts. She was talking with the youth and she was like, “What are we going to do about this?” His friends were feeling so many emotions and so in dismay about what happened. So she wanted to re-invoke We Charge Genocide, which was an original petition in 1951. It was documenting 153 more lynchings of black men in America, and talking about how it’s genocide basically. She wanted to really re-invoke that and push it for now because the same things are happening. Like, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement came out with the Every 36 Hours report, that a Black man is killed by law enforcement or a vigilante. Now, in 2015, it’s every 8 hours that a Black person is killed.

She got a bunch of organizers that were already doing the work around challenging police violence in the city and got all together [to say] “What are we going to do about this? How are we going to uplift and center the voices and experiences of Black and brown youth in Chicago who are most directly impacted by this police violence? How are we going to navigate that?”

So, We Charge Genocide started. There’s lots of little pockets of what we do: the thing that I do is the Chi Cop Watch. It functions as sort of an education and documentation aspect of We Charge Genocide. We do Cop Watch trainings for community members where we’re giving community members access, resources, and tools around how to watch the cops—what you need to actually do, the numbers of people you need, the basic Know Your Rights, what to say when you get stopped by cops, things like that.

Nia King: What do you actually need to watch the cops? [Monica laughs] Because I feel like there’s been a number of stories recently of about how people who have taken video of police murders or police brutality have been jailed and imprisoned.

Monica: Mmhmm.

Nia: So, what are your rights to document abuse by police?

Monica: Yeah, so you can record—it is legal. It varies from state to state, the technicalities around it, but I know in Illinois, for example, it is legal to record the cops from within more than an arm’s reach. So you have to be that distance away, which is good for you, right? Because you don’t wanna be in that same vicinity either. You never really want to do it alone, you wanna have at least a couple of people that know what to do. There’s lots of things to navigate. You have to navigate: the police officer that’s probably gonna be telling you to get away, you need a person

to mediate and be like, “We have the right” and asserting that right. But then you also need the person with the recorder actually documenting it. And then you need the person maybe taking down notes, because your phone could get taken away. There’s lots of roles most people can play when they cop watch. Chi Cop Watch is not centralized. There is a national Cop Watch effort, this is just de-centralizing that and giving people the tools to start their own.

It’s pretty important. We started utilizing this hashtag #ChiCopWatch on social media and trying to get folks to start using it as a mode of documenting the real-time sort of live-stream almost of the harassment and violence that youth face in Chicago all the time. Almost as a mobilization tool. If I see something happening on the corner of 18th and Halsted in Chicago and I am by myself, putting that out there and being like, “Hey, this is happening.” Then taking a picture of the police and being like, “Is anyone else around here? Can y’all come out?” And then forming this impromptu cop watching moment.

We recently—I recently talked with folks at Kuumba Lynx, which is this youth organization in Chicago that focuses on the elements of hip-hop and art and culture being integral to organizing. We recently had asked them: Why is Chi Cop Watch important? So why is it important to watch the cops in our communities? Why is it critical? We recorded them and they said a lot of really brilliant things about why we need to watch the cops. Youth have these answers already. They know exactly what they need to get by on a daily basis, and so it’s super important to listen to them and hear what they have to say and not feel like we have to go in there and teach them Know Your Rights 101. A lot of them are doing that work already. It’s important to pay attention to that.

Nia: Yeah. And you grew up in Chicago, so you’re not an outsider coming in and trying to… Did you experience a lot of police harassment or see this happen in your community when you were growing up?

Monica: You know, I don’t think that I personally experienced it, but I definitely witnessed family members being harassed for, being outside on the front porch, or cops coming in [saying], “What are you guys doing? Let me see your IDs. That sort of thing—the general heavy policing of our communities.

But I have never really had any intense experiences [with cops myself], luckily. It’s almost sad how normalized it has become. Because when I think back, “Yeah, oh yeah, I do remember seeing lots of Black folks constantly being stopped and harassed.” Lots of my family members just being questioned all the time, but it just became this everyday aspect of my life that it never felt shocking, which is really sad.

Transcribed by Van Binfa