Season 2 episode 15 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we interview Aviah. A sneaky extra episode after the season closer! It took us a while to get back together. Aviah is a lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, and is a community organiser the rest of the time. She is involved in the East End branch of Sisters Uncut, a national direct-action collective fighting cuts to domestic violence services as well as state violence. She is also involved in Hackney Copwatch, London Renters Union and the Kill the Bill Coalition, a national movement resisting the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill. “Effectively, if you can organise enough people to [know their rights and intervene] in a coordinated way, then you can actually withdraw consent from policing altogether” - Aviah Show notes, links * Netpol: the network for police monitoring * Newham Monitoring Project, which shut down in 2016 after running for 36 years * United Families and Friends Campaign, a coalition of people affected by deaths in state custody. * There are Copwatch groups in Hackney, Bristol, Manchester, Lambeth, Liverpool, Southwark, Haringey, and Cardiff. * the Anti-Raids Network, community resistance to immigration raids To find out about Copwatch, if you're considering getting involved: either DM an existing group (accounts listed above) or email sistersuncut@gmail.com! We now have a Patreon! Please help keep the podcast going, at patreon.com/resistrenew. If not, there's always the classic ways to support: like, share, and subscribe! Transcript SAMI: Hello everybody and welcome to this sneaky extra episode of The Resist and Renew Podcast, where we are interviewing Aviah. Do you want to say hi? AVIAH: Hi. SAMI: Seamless. So Aviah is a lecturer, at Birkbeck, which is part of the University of London, and also does a lot of community organizing, and she's involved in the East End branch of Sisters Uncut, which is one branch of a national organization that's like a direct action collective fighting cuts to domestic violence services, and other forms of state violence, and Aviah is also involved in local branches of CopWatch so Hackney CopWatch and London Renters Union, and is also involved Kill the Bill coalition - a national movement resisting the Policing Crime and Sentencing Bill that is currently going through the parliamentary organs, as we record this in early March, 2022. SAMI: So first things first.. Aviah what can you say about the political context that you are organizing in? AVIAH: The current political context is probably the most intense political context I’ve ever organized in. It's been a very intense year. And, yeah, there's, there's a sort of ongoing political crisis, particularly for the Metropolitan Police, that we, you know, at Sisters Uncut and also the Kill the Bill coalition and cop watch groups have been organizing to exploit. If that doesn't sound too Machiavellian, maybe I don't mind if it sounds too Machiavellian, I do want to destroy the cops, that's fine. AVIAH: But yeah, I guess that kind of that emerged out of,