Safety Checklist for Action Organizers

Form an affinity group with trusted folks.

Discuss the risk tolerances of each person in your group.

Design your action with these risk tolerances in mind. Aim to take strategic risks and avoid unnecessary ones.

Do a risk assessment.

Assess how likely different risks are, based on your action design and local conditions. Risk mapping with others can help you separate the risks that need your attention from fears that don’t.

Use Signal and make sure everyone has disappearing messages turned on by default for all new threads.

Make a plan to have most phones off-site.

Anyone risking arrest should either (A) leave their phone at home or (B) power it down and give it to one person who collects phones and returns them after arrests. Anyone who still has a phone should turn it off if the risk of arrest goes up.

Don’t write things down that you wouldn’t want read back to you in court, even on Signal.

Recruit a safety/de-escalation team.

Help them get trained if needed. Also recruit medics, especially if you anticipate violence from bystanders or police.

Hold a briefing with the safety team.

Make sure everyone has a buddy.

Find a movement lawyer and consult them about your action.

Places to look: your local NLG chapter, the National Lawyers Guild, Movement Law Lab, or CLDC. See questions to ask your attorney about legal risks.

Hold a legal briefing for your group with a movement-aligned lawyer, so everyone understands the range of risks and knows how to assert their rights.

Find trained Legal Observers to observe your action if needed.

Recruit a jail support team with at least one on-site and one off-site person.

Do not talk about organizing while in custody.
Don't say anything about the action or other organizing while in custody. Assume you're being recorded. Find other ways to keep yourselves occupied (songs, games, etc.). And still don't talk to the cops!

Collect jail support forms.
For coordinated, pre-planned actions, collect a form from everyone risking arrest (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3). Paper is best, but CryptPad forms work if you need to go digital.

Pick a phone number folks can call from jail if needed.
This can be a local NLG hotline (if you’ve arranged it with them!) or just someone in your group who is off-site. Make sure each person writes it on their body with a Sharpie.

Recruit a police liaison.

Destroy all jail support info after the action, including digital files or CryptPad forms.

Develop action agreements (Example 1, Example 2).

Create a vetting or vouching process.

Create need-to-know agreements.

Don’t share information with anyone outside your group who doesn’t need to know, and don’t talk about the action, before or after, with anyone who wasn’t involved.

Practice solidarity against state repression.

Under this authoritarian state, names that colleagues shared have been used to expand surveillance, and jokes from Signal threads people handed over have been presented in court as serious threats. Don’t talk to the cops, don’t give them access to data or information, and don’t become a cooperating witness. This is how we keep each other safe.