Police harassment and violence against homeless people is a common practice that
is forbidden to talk about. Download, print and distribute the April issue of theA3 wall newspaper! ---- It is not difficult to come across a homeless person. Itis even an increasingly common phenomenon. A bourgeois tale for mindless foolsabout how wealth trickles down from the top to the very bottom under capitalismis exposed as a simple fabrication and a lie by a mere walk through the city.Nothing is getting better in this direction, on the contrary. The police aretrying to push homeless people out of city centers and into the periphery. Andthey often do so using bullying, humiliation and violence.The exhibition "Violence and order" by the NAP initiative of the same name washeld in Pilsen in March during the human rights film festival on this very topic.At the same time, she launched a website (nasiliaporadek.tilda.ws) informingabout local police violence against homeless people and organized a petition toinvestigate this practice used by the Pilsen city police.For years, it has been an open secret among social service providers, the police,officials and politicians in Pilsen that the police regularly use illegalviolence against homeless people. But no one wants to talk about it publicly.Social service providers and workers are afraid to open up about these topics.The reason is the legitimate assumption that for the publication of individualstories, the police will retaliate against homeless people with more or moreviolence. Of course, the victims of this violence themselves are much more afraidto talk about it.The NAP initiative came up with a unique source of information. These are thestatements of the police officers themselves, who admit that they witnessed thebrutal illegal behavior of their colleagues. This is what they say in thebachelor's thesis defended at the local university by an employee of the PilsenMunicipal Police, and it is not reading for the faint of heart. Even moreappalling are the statements collected by social workers from homeless peoplethemselves, for whom police violence and harassment are nothing out of theordinary. And one wonders how such a thing is even possible.The Chief of the Plzen Municipal Police, Petr Novácek, reacted to the publishedinformation like a typical fool - according to the motto "Deny and intimidate",he first declared that almost the entire bachelor's thesis was fictional, andthen filed a criminal complaint against its author, took away part of his salaryand took away the award for five years of service. It is reminiscent of thepolice killing of Stanislav Tomásh in Teplice in June 2021, when top policeofficers, including politicians, did not wait for an investigation andimmediately falsely claimed that everything went well, while witness intimidationtook place.Representatives of the department where the author of the bachelor's thesisstudied described the police procedure as an unprecedented intervention inacademic research. In addition, the NAP initiative pointed out that theincredible level of police violence against homeless people in Pilsen is not onlyresponsible for perpetrators from the ranks of the police, but also the citymanagement and politicians who incite hatred towards them. After all, the mayor,who is also the official head of the city police, openly says that "the firststep should be repression" in the direction of the homeless. But even theinnocent association of homeless people in the city center is often considered aviolation of public order. Police officers try to meet demands to "clean up thecity" with illegal and brutally violent acts. So the roots of the problem lie inconservative discriminatory policies, which are inherently depraved and antisocial.Pilsen is no exception in this regard, and a similar inhumane practice oftreating homeless people is common in many other places as well. There willcertainly be voices that speak of individual failure or demonize homeless people.But the goal of such pseudo-argumentation is only an attempt to cover the veryessence of capitalism, which creates a world full of social inequality andinjustice. There is no place in capitalism for those who suffer from somephysical or mental handicap, do not have sharp enough elbows or were not borninto a secure background. The capitalist system, which completely unjustifiablypresents itself as the best of the possible and does not allow any thought of apossible alternative, does not care about the existence of homeless people. Onthe one hand, their presence clearly undermines the ideological clichés that theyspread around them, and moreover, it disrupts the philistine aesthetics of thosewho believe in such delusions. The response of the capitalist order is thebullying of the economically unsuccessful, whatever the reasons for theircondition, and the associated structural violence against them and the effort tophysically remove them from the view of the more economically successful.In addition to criticizing the asocial capitalist order and fighting for thevision of a solidary and self-governing society, one must raise one's voicewhenever specific people are harmed - moreover, by the repressive elements whoare so happy to lie in front of the public about how they help and protect.https://www.afed.cz/text/7923/a3-nasili-a-poradek_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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