Prefigurative Community Building (Part 36)
Copwatch and Community Defense as Power With: A Step-by-Step Guide to Collective Safety
For many communities, especially those targeted by police, white supremacists, or state violence, safety doesn't come from the state. It comes from each other. It comes from coordination. It comes from the slow, quiet courage of people who witness, record, intervene, and care.
Community defense, at its best, is a Power With formation: built horizontally, rooted in trust, and designed not to dominate but to disarm. Traditional safety systems reinforce Power Over through hierarchies of force. But real safety arises when people act together, not just for themselves, but for the whole.
This essay is a guide to building a nonviolent community defense project that avoids all forms of Power Over. It offers practical steps, helpful tools, and examples of projects already doing this work. Copwatch, jail support crews, neighborhood accompaniment networks, these aren’t just reactive. They are prefigurative, shaping the future by how they respond to the present.
Step-by-Step: Starting a Power With Community Defense Project
Step 1: Begin With Trust, Not Tactics
Before organizing anything public-facing, take time to build relational safety within your group. Trust is the foundation. You can’t coordinate well under pressure if you don’t know each other’s boundaries, communication styles, or limits.
Create a small circle of 4–10 people committed to the work. Share stories, define collective values, and agree on how decisions will be made. Rotate leadership. Normalize care, check-ins, and opt-outs.
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Step 2: Map the Threats, Then the Terrain
What harms are happening or likely to happen in your area? Police brutality? ICE raids? White supremacist violence? Abusive landlords? Transphobic street harassment?
Don’t respond to general fear, respond to real patterns. Talk to neighbors, check incident logs, listen to marginalized voices. Then map what assets already exist: trusted stores, safe houses, local groups, bystanders, skills.
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Step 3: Train for Presence, Not Policing
Copwatch is not about confrontation. It’s about de-escalation, witnessing, and accountability. Train your team to observe safely, document clearly, and intervene only if safe. Practice staying calm. Learn body language cues and verbal diffusion tactics.
Also train for internal care: trauma response, non-carceral conflict resolution, how to support a comrade in distress.
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Step 4: Develop Communication and Safety Protocols
Decide how you’ll mobilize: group chats, phone trees, encrypted tools like Signal or Element. Make clear what’s public, what’s private, and who gets what info.
Set up protocols for: jail support, emergency accompaniment, post-action check-ins, and collective decision-making under stress.
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Step 5: Go Public, Slowly and Respectfully
Start small. Maybe it’s street presence during protests, or showing up at night to witness police patrols in your neighborhood. Maybe it’s setting up a jail support line or handing out flyers on how to film police safely.
Don’t come in as saviors. Come in as neighbors. Build visibility through presence, not self-promotion.
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Step 6: Center the Margins, Always
Let your work be led by the most impacted: Black, Indigenous, trans, disabled, undocumented, and poor community members. Don’t just include them, design your systems around their needs and wisdom.
Accountability isn’t a checkbox. It’s an ongoing practice.
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Step 7: Replicate, Don’t Scale
Once your group is steady, help others start their own. Host skillshares. Write zines. Document what works. Avoid becoming an “official” hub. Power With spreads through shared capacity, not centralized control.
Like a mycelial network, let your structure remain horizontal, adaptable, and mutually nourishing.
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Examples of Real-World Power With Community Defense Projects
1. WeCopwatch (USA)
A decentralized network of people training communities to film the police and protect each other. They emphasize community autonomy, nonviolence, and direct observation, no saviorism, no hierarchies.
2. The Black Movement Law Project (USA)
A collective of legal workers providing rapid jail support, legal education, and direct action coordination. Their model centers abolitionist principles and mutual accountability, not savior-based lawyering.
Conclusion: Real Safety is a Shared Practice
In a world where state institutions weaponize “protection” to maintain domination, communities must reclaim safety as a collective act. Copwatch and community defense aren’t just about reducing harm in the present. They’re part of building the world to come, one where Power With replaces Power Over in every domain.
That world will only come if we rehearse it now. Every time we witness instead of walk away, de-escalate instead of punish, or show up instead of retreat, we weave the fabric of collective safety. That fabric doesn’t scale like an institution. It spreads like trust. Like solidarity. Like mycelium.
And that’s how we keep each other safe.