Kristian Williams

Last week I did an interview for AshevilleFM.org. I talked a bit about the history of policing, about recent anti-cop resistance, and about the developing politics of police abolition. It’s archived here.

Some time ago I wrote a review of Mike Howlett’s Weird World of Eerie Publications for The Comics Journal.

More recently, I wrote a short essay for the Progressive Populist, comparing two comics explaining the economic crisis — Erich Origen and Gan Golan’s Adventures of Unemployed Man and Seth Tobocman, Eric Laursen and Jessica Wehrle’s Understanding the Crash. The piece is mis-labeled as a review, but it isn’t really evaluative; instead it reflects on the different genre choices and visual strategies the two titles employ.

Old horror or new economics — Which is scarier?

I’ll be speaking at the International Copwatching Conference in Winnipeg.

I’m offering the keynote address Saturday, July 23rd, at 9am. Titled “Making Copwatch Matter,” the talk will consider the political potential of copwatching and the real challenges copwatch groups face.

Then, on Sunday, July 24, at 3pm, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion on copwatch tactics. There, I’ll tell the story of Rose City Copwatch’s debut action — a poster campaign to expose killer cops.

It looks like there are going to be a lot of great presentations at the conference. Check out the full schedule.

The May issue of Interface includes an article I’ve written on counterinsurgency and community policing. It extends the argument from Our Enemies in Blue, and it includes discussion of recent developments in COIN theory, in military doctrine, and in police/military collaborations.

I’ve also just written a piece, “Profiles of Provocateurs,” looking at a few recent cases of anarchists or radical environmentalists being entrapped by state agents. In an effort to learn from past mistakes, I point out some of the warning signs that the victims of these campaigns overlooked, or sometimes, deliberately ignored. I’m posting the essay to various activist sites.

And, I took my lecture from the “Law and Disorder” conference, and turned it into a small essay. The piece considers the political and strategic divergences between the police accountability framework and that of police abolition, and it describes the areas of overlap where cooperation between the adherents of each can cooperate. It’s appeared in the most recent issue (#106) of the Canadian journal Slingshot.