I’m writing this just two days before Trump takes office, for the second time. There’s a whole slew of reasons this makes many people in the US concerned for their safety. In this post I’m going to talk about the set of situations I’m loosely calling ‘civil unrest’ — everything from police crackdowns of street protests to right-wing rallies meant to instigate violence. My aim is to help people who are concerned about getting caught up in the middle of something they’re unprepared for.
My background on this includes two key sets of events spanning twenty years. The more recent one was the racial justice protests in Portland that took place in 2020, where I spent months documenting nightly events through the work of independent reporters and local media. I also found myself right in the middle of the Seattle WTO protests in 1999. I wrote about how that experience affected me here.
The first thing to know is that events can be very local. In downtown Portland, the area around City Hall, the federal building, central police station, and federal courthouse spans three square blocks. Other parts of downtown were affected in 2020, as well as neighborhoods around police stations, but the majority of Portland wasn’t in earshot or tear gas range of what was happening. In Seattle in 1999, protests and police violence affected a larger geographic area but still in the central city. People in most neighborhoods could get around without encountering issues as long as they didn’t need to go downtown. (Also the restricted area increased when Clinton arrived, which I found really annoying.)
National media will pretty much always get things wrong. Either because they don’t know the geography (and this is a particular gripe for me since that was my field of study), they’ve fallen prone to sweeping narratives, or they’re repeating what police and local government are saying without checking it out. The last one is actually why I ended up starting the protest blog — I was astonished by how easy it was for the mayor to lie about what protesters were doing and have everyone repeat it.
This creates an environment where it’s easy for all kinds of misinformation to thrive. Rumors take off fast, and there’s often no way to verify them unless you know someone who’s right there in the midst of things. It’s important to cultivate a skill of asking how we know what we’re hearing is right. If that rumor has no provenance, then it might be a good idea to hold off on sharing it.
So given this set of challenges, what’s the best way to stay safe?
One — find on the ground sources you can trust. That might be local media. Have a look at their current reporting on crime and community safety to get a sense of how they handle things. It might be independent reporters on social media. Again, look at their work and see how well it holds up against other sources of information. Or it can be from friends, if you know people who have direct contact with the places things are happening, or the people affected (I’m thinking of immigration raids here). For the protest blog, I tried to always find two sources for any significant piece of information. That’s easier when there’s a lot of people on the ground, but a good aim overall.
Next, have a good look at the map. Where are your local police stations, government offices, and courthouses? Where are parks or public spaces where people often gather for rallies? Figure out if any of these places are on a route between where you live and places you regularly go, like work, schools, and grocery stores. If that’s the case, identify alternate routes. And if one of those locations is particularly close to your home, it may be useful to think about where you can go if a situation heats up. Police will use chemical weapons like tear gas indiscriminately and do not care whether they’re in a residential neighborhood. I’m not going to get into PPE recommendations for that today, but let me know if you want to see it in a future post.
There could be other hot spots too, local businesses, churches, anywhere that people gather. The things I wrote about community safety in 2020 apply here. I covered the supplies you need to shelter in place as well as being ready to evacuate.
Last, know who you can call on for help. Even if the threat isn’t right on your doorstep, it can be a relief to just let someone else watch the news for a while so you can put your phone down and get some rest. There are a lot of ways we can support each other.
These are difficult times and it’s so important to remember that we’re in it together. I don’t know what will happen in the next few weeks or this year, but I can tell you that being more prepared for disasters will help you through all kinds of situations, and cultivating the skills to make sense of what’s happening and know when you need to act will help you avoid panic and make the best decisions to look out for yourself and the people you care about.
Stay safe.