“Abolition of the police needs to go hand in hand with a transformation of society” – an interview with BigSibling Collective
BigSibling is an activist collective from Vienna, Austria that started 2018 as a reaction to increased police violence and racial profiling. We had the chance to interview one of the activists for our #temapolis week and talk to them about their experiences.
Hej A. Thanks so much for taking the time for this interview. You are part of the Big Sibling Collective, based in Vienna Austria. Can you maybe say something about the collective and its start?. How did it come to be and why did you build it? Did it start at a specific point in time in Austria as a reaction or it just happened anyway?
Hey Nik.
Thank you for your interest! What a nice possibility to exchange on international level.
Big Sibling was founded in early 2018 out of and as a response to frustration with the normalization of racist police violence and impunity for police brutality. As a collective we are people with diverse political backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. A few of us experience racist police violence repeatedly, while others are in the privileged position of not being affected. Together we aim to empower those affected by police violence, to support them and to make their experiences and resistances visible. We want to inform people about their rights and spread strategies of action, which can support them to take action against racist police violence and to empower them to take action.
In 2018, there was a racist police control of a rapper T-Ser in a park in Vienna. He filmed the situation and was able to make himself heard through his prominence. Nevertheless, or as expected, police denied allegations of racial profiling and there were no consequences for the police officers involved.
How does your collective work? Where is your main field of intervention?
Most importantly we want to work with and for people affected by racists police repression. We want to offer empowerment and support.
Through our work, we want to draw attention to racist police violence in Austria, expose the structural and institutional racism that is concealed behind the police as an institution and make the effects of such a system more visible. At the same time, we want to offer space to develop possible ways of resistance and visions for a society without police. Our understanding of racist police violence is intersectional, this means we see racist police violence always functions interconnected with other structures of discrimination.
To give this a more international context: In Germany there was a big discussion in the media in the summer of 2020, following the BLM protests, about the wider left's position towards the police, which differs quite a lot. Calls for reform and abolition were heard. How is the situation in Vienna/Austria. Is it the same discussion? And what is your group's position in all this?
In Austria, the media also reported about the murder of George Floyd and the protest and demonstrations of Black Lives Matter. But rather in the sense that police violence is happening far away in the USA to differentiate Austria’s police from the police violence. And that brutal racist police officers in Austria are only individual cases. There were also reports about the demonstrations, but only for a short time and it was rather about why do Black people in Austria go demonstrate for causes that are happening in the USA. Towards reformation, the media were a bit more open, but nothing has really changed. Rather the opposite has happened with the police being granted even more power and rights. From civil society and grass root organization the BLM movement has spread some momentum, of course mainly by people affected by police violence. Some of their demands are reformist, some are not.
We as Big Sibling follow the abolitionist thoughts and demands of Black activists and groups: to defund and abolish the police. Structural racism in the police as an institution is inherent. And we also fight for a different system, abolition of the police needs to go hand in hand with a transformation of society. We need alternatives to policing.
What do you mean when you talk about alternatives to policing. Can you elaborate on that? What is your vision for an alternative and how do we get there?
This question is difficult to answer briefly.
An already widely demanded alternative is the use of social workers and psychotherapists instead of repressive police. But in general, as we fight for systemic change also, we think the root causes need to be addressed: Why do people have to steal in our society? Why don’t all people have access to medical care? How can it be that people do not have housing while investors leave urban housing empty? We need fair distribution of resources and fair distribution of housing.
Our visions are both very specific as well as very vague. To elaborate our and everyone’s utopian imagination, we offer workshops on imagining a world without police. By expressing and discussing our needs, fears and ideas, a police-free utopia becomes more realistic and possible. What until now seemed unattainable becomes more tangible. And we think this is one possibility how we can get there.
How can we individually but also collectively work towards this change?
One of the most important things is to reflect where you stand in the society, what privileges you hold and how you can use and share them. We can start by reflecting our own policing behavior. Growing up in our society, we all have internalized policing mechanisms. So start by questioning yourself, when and how do you police? Reflect on how can I or do I harm others with my internalized policing? Why are some things criminalized and others are not? Why is stealing criminalized so much more than tax evasion?
Collectively, we need to form solidarity networks to be able to rely on each other instead of on the police. We need to inform ourselves and others about faults in our system, which includes police and their racist practices.
Do you think there are limits to this vision within our current economic system?
Definitely! For example, police and capitalism are tightly linked together. The police are there to protect property whereas poverty is criminalized. The same with nationalism, which protects the interests of the capitalist nation state, whereas all who are out of a state norm (e.g. white, hetero, rich, able-bodied…) are criminalized and controlled by the police. We live in a society, where Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BI_PoC) are those who are not considered to be part of the 'we', the ones who are expelled from certain neighborhoods (gentrification), the ones who are pushed into the low-wage sector, who have hardly any chance for education, who have to work in precarious jobs etc. The intersection with classism plays a huge role here. Therefore, the fight against police must be an anti-capitalist one.
What are the cultural myths around the police like in Austria?
The police are your friend and helper – which originated from the national socialism era. They are supposed to provide security and to protect you from strangers/outsiders. The police will stand up for justice.
Here in Sweden a TV show about the police in Malmö was released last year and has become highly successful. It has been critically reviewed by many but even more unquestionably celebrated as authentic insight into the daily lives of the local police.
How is the police portrayed in the Austrian media?
Police reports are often simply taken over by the media. The idea of “neutral press coverage” does not exists, I guess you could say, that in Austria the press is a big fan of the police. For example, if you look at the coverage of Corona-denier demonstrations: the images that are shown are from the counter-demonstrations where leftists are criminalized and portrayed as the ‘rioting people’. Just recently on May 1st, the police reported 100 rioting leftists, who were throwing cans and bottles, to justify repression and arrests. Whereas independent media, such as Presse Service Wien (presse-service.net), reported that most protestors where peacefully sitting in the park and that a pepper spray attack by a civilian police officer presumably led to the escalation of the situation which ended with violent police practices and injured persons.
How is the general perception and media attention to police violence and abuse in Austria?
Police violence and brutality is definitely legitimized. If we look at the media coverage from May 1st, politicians applauded and thanked the police for their ‘great effort’. And if we go back to the event that led to Big Sibling’s foundation: the police officers who racial profiled rapper T-Ser were granted an award by a mayor from the right-wing party FPÖ ‘in solitary for being unfairly criticized’.
As you have been working since 2018 what are the most important conclusions and insights you have gotten from this time, as an individual but also as an organization?
It is important to analyze police violence through an intersectional perspective. To make space for the people who are targeted the most by the police and are mostly invisible in the fight against racial profiling even though they fight every day! Often only cis-men are mentioned when it comes to racial profiling and police violence, but women, transgender persons, queers, people with mental health problems and many more are also affected by this violence.
Also it is important to distinguish between reformist and abolitionists actions in a first step in order to get closer to abolition. This is something we can put into practice right away. To further develop the idea of a world without police, we need time and space. There is no such thing as the perfect answer to that. And it’s work, it won’t just happen.
Furthermore, corona aggravated the situation especially for BI_PoC youths with regard to racial profiling. We need to bring people together and create spaces to connect and organize. There is a lot of ancestral and embodied knowledge we already have, sometimes we just have to listen and learn.
And on an organizational level to continue doing sustainable activism, we also have to look out for our group from time to time, build support structures among each other and work on our relationships.
Interviewed by Nicolas
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