The Cost of Bearing Witness: ICE, Resistance, and the Long American Tradition of Watching Power Back
- Zeudi Liew
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 8 hours ago
This is how democracy is hollowed out.Not overnight.Not through shouted decrees or dramatic ruptures.
But through paperwork, fines, investigations — until dissent becomes too expensive, too risky, too exhausting to sustain.
Across Europe and beyond, the governments we elect speak the language of rights while practising control. Neoliberal democracies borrow the tools of autocracies; autocracies borrow the vocabulary of democracy. The result is the same everywhere: shrinking civic space, disciplined silence. Dissent is not treated as a crime because it is violent, but because it is visible.
We like to believe that injustice happens elsewhere. But it grows at home, under governments we legitimise, through laws passed in our name. Another world is not only possible.
This one — hollowed out, procedural, obedient — is already here. And if we do not name it, resist it, and change it, it will finish its work.
It is within this context that community monitoring emerges — not as ideology, but as necessity. It arises when institutions meant to safeguard rights instead become sources of fear; when accountability mechanisms collapse; when official narratives erase lived reality.
In those moments, ordinary people organise to document, observe, and remember — not as vigilantes, but as witnesses.
This is what happened in Minneapolis.
Moments before being killed by federal agents, Alex Jeffrey Pretti was filming them with his phone. He was doing what generations of activists have done before him: using presence, visibility, and documentation as a form of peaceful resistance. Filming was not an act of provocation. It was an act of civic duty.
In the United States, this practice is often referred to as copwatching. Its roots are not new. In 1966, in the aftermath of Malcolm X’s assassination and widespread urban uprisings, the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale to protect Black communities from police brutality. Panthers monitored police activity, asserting the right of communities to observe, document, and deter abuse. At the same time, they built extensive survival programmes — healthcare, legal aid, food distribution — confronting the economic injustices that civil rights reforms had left untouched.
This fusion of visibility, community care, and political self-defence made the Panthers a target. Through COINTELPRO, the federal government sought to dismantle the Party, a campaign that culminated in 1969 with police raids and the killing of Fred Hampton. The message was clear: when communities organise to make power visible and accountable, repression follows.
The lineage did not disappear. It evolved.
Today, cameras have replaced patrols, but the logic remains unchanged: power behaves differently when it is seen.
In theory, the law protects this practice. The First Amendment safeguards the right to observe and record law enforcement in public spaces, as long as operations are not physically obstructed. In practice, that protection is increasingly fragile.
The killing of Pretti — like earlier cases in Minneapolis — exposes the fault line between rights on paper and rights in reality.
Video footage recorded by activists contradicted the official account given by the Trump administration, which claimed that agents acted in self-defence. This pattern is not new. The deaths of Renée Nicole Good, George Floyd, and earlier still Rodney King were only made visible — and politically undeniable — because someone recorded what the state denied.
And yet, those who document are increasingly treated as threats.
Community monitors are accused of interference; observers are framed as agitators; accountability itself is recast as danger. Peaceful witnessing becomes criminalised.
This extends beyond citizens to journalists.
According to Reporters Without Borders, the United States is experiencing its first prolonged decline in press freedom in modern history. After a century of gradual expansion of press rights, the return of Donald Trump to the presidency has sharply accelerated this erosion.
Attacks by ICE and other federal forces on members of the press have become so frequent and consistent that they amount to policy, signalling a dangerous disregard for the First Amendment and a troubling turn for American democracy.
This erosion does not stop at U.S. borders. The restriction of civic space — the ability to associate, protest, document, and dissent — has reached a critical point globally.
According to the CIVICUS Monitor, more than 70% of the world’s population now lives in countries where civic space is closed, repressed, or obstructed.
Even Europe, long framed as a democratic safe haven, has seen a sharp decline: countries such as the UK, Italy, and Greece have been downgraded due to restrictive laws, police violence against protesters, and the criminalisation of those defending migrants.
History never appears out of nowhere. Those who have lived under authoritarian regimes — or who carry their memory through family histories — know what constant vigilance means. They know what it is to look over one’s shoulder, to live with the sense that power’s shadow can stretch at any moment to seize you, to make you disappear.
What makes this moment more dangerous is that armed violence, military supremacy, are no longer only external — no longer confined to distant wars, as in Iraq or Afghanistan. It has come home. It is domestic.
We are living through a renewed wave of anti-immigration policies and reprisals against dissent, part of a thin but insidious thread stretching across borders — a growing international architecture of repression. Old ghosts have fused with the present: white supremacy that never vanished, militarised forces turned inward, exceptional powers normalised.
We are spectators — and, if we are not careful, accomplices — to a machine that does not stop on its own, yet...
...And yet, we are not without protection. Historical memory remains one of our most powerful defences.
Memory matters because democracies — even the most established ones — have always been fragile, contested, and repeatedly placed under stress.
Today, as a transnational architecture of repression takes shape — a kind of black internationalism built on fear, securitisation, and exclusion — memory reminds us that this is not the first time power has tightened its grip.
In the United States in particular, memory carries a specific weight. This is a country that has also been home to some of the most transformative movements for justice: the civil rights movement, mass resistance to the Vietnam War, the Chicago trials, the Red and Brown Power movements, feminist and queer liberation struggles.
These movements reshaped universities, streets, courts, and public consciousness. They expanded rights not because institutions offered them willingly, but because people organised, disrupted, documented, and refused silence.
This is what memory is for. Not nostalgia, but orientation.
Memory teaches us that repression is never inevitable, that democratic space has always been fought for, defended, and reclaimed.
It allows us to recognise injustice even when it disguises itself as security, protection, or order.
It reminds us that these moments are never accidents, never exceptions — they are the product of systems that depend on our forgetting. And it tells us something else, just as crucial:
that resistance, too, has a lineage — and we are part of it.
Community monitoring is not a substitute for justice systems.
It is what remains when justice systems fail.
It is an act of collective memory in a time of institutional amnesia. A refusal to let violence disappear into paperwork. A reminder that democracy is not exercised only at the ballot box, but also in the street — with a phone held steady, documenting what power hopes no one will see.
To film is not to attack.
To witness is not to provoke.
To document is not to threaten.
Because when states fail, communities do not just resist.
They remember.
Zeudi Liew
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