In Memory of Rosebud, Defender of People’s Park

From CrimethInc.

On the thirtieth anniversary of her death at the hands of police, we present a poster in memory of anarchist and People’s Park defender Rosebud Abigail Denovo (RAD). Rosebud was a runaway hitchhiker, juvenile institution escapee, and anarchist. She was killed shortly after her nineteenth birthday while participating in the struggle for public commons in Berkeley, California.

Today, People’s Park is once again under attack. The University of California at Berkeley attempted to level the park on August 3; destruction is slated to resume in October. You can keep up with efforts to defend the park here.


Click on the image to download the poster. Poster courtesy of Privatelifeonline.


Rosebud, One of the People

In 1969, two clandestine lovers authored a call in a Yippie underground rag to turn the derelict, university-owned lot that they used for a romantic rendezvous into a park. A hundred people turned out the first day, and over the next month more than a thousand people—without permission or legal ownership—turned the lot into People’s Park by removing trash and putting in plants and art. Governor Ronald Reagan sent in troopers and cops to evict the “haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants,” killing one onlooker and injuring dozens more with buckshot and tear gas. In turn, park defenders tore down fences and resisted the police by throwing bricks at them and setting their cars on fire. Throughout the 1970s, people defended People’s Park by occupying it en masse whenever the university threatened to begin construction.

Footage from the origins of People’s Park in the 1960s.


While coincidentally squatting the same property that Ted Kaczynski had resided on as a University of California at Berkeley math professor in 1969, Rosebud threw herself into the defense
of the three-acre park founded that same year.


People’s Park in the 1960s.


In 1991, riot police escorted bulldozers to tear down the park’s Free Speech Stage and build university volleyball courts. Rosebud was arrested for trespassing, vandalism, and attacking police officers in the ensuing defense. Days later, police raided her campsite, where they found a crossbow with arrows, a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook, and a diary entry addressed to the university chancellor: “[Y]ou’re not getting off that easy.”

Early in the morning of August 25, 1992, Rosebud used a blowtorch to cut through bars and break into the house of the chancellor of the university, setting off a silent alarm. Police entered the house and fatally shot Rosebud in the back. In one hand, like an anarchist from the era of propaganda of the deed, she carried a note demanding an end to construction in People’s Park: “We are willing to die for this piece of land. Are you?” In the other hand, she carried a machete.

Mourners clashed with
police
for a week after Rosebud’s death. The District Attorney declined to charge the cop that shot her.


Click on the image to download the poster in black and white. Poster courtesy of Privatelifeonline.


An Account from the Defense of People’s Park, August 2022

On August 2, 2022, just hours after court approval, UC Berkeley erected fences around People’s Park. In the still of the night, construction crews began felling trees. A tweet
called people to go to the park and defend it.

At midnight on August 3, 2022, a mass text alert went out announcing that the University of California at Berkeley had began their preparations to seize People’s Park—and that they were expecting a fight for this historic revolutionary public space. UC Berkeley deployed their own police department in full riot gear to protect the contractors they had hired to build a fence around the perimeter of the park.


Park defenders face off with police early on August 3, 2022.


We arrived around 2 am, as People’s Park defenders were being arrested for laying their bodies down where the contractors were installing anti-climbing fences. By sunrise, there were perhaps twenty defenders and park residents left inside the park, facing off against over a hundred UC Berkeley riot cops, private security, social and community workers, as well as dozens of construction workers. Tree service workers waited on the side street behind a police barricade for the riot police to evacuate the defenders from the park.

The final dispersal was at 9:30 AM. Some park defenders took their last stand inside the old kitchen structure; only five remained inside the park, but UCPD entered the park with intention to carry out arrests. Slowly, the other park defenders were kettled outside of the fence by over 70 riot police in full riot gear wielding batons and dog catcher sticks. The defenders chanted, “Sacred land, sacred space, People’s Park must remain.”


This parent and child team participated in the defense of the park. Nineteen years ago, they planted the tree they are standing with here. During the assault on People’s Park, they watched as the university killed it.


Expert Tree Service entered the park and started clear-cutting it while the remaining defenders still remained on top of the kitchen. They took down 47 trees—including redwoods, cedar, cypress, oaks, and fruit trees, some trees older than the park and others planted in people’s honor.

More park defenders arrived to the sound of chainsaws, realizing what had happened while they slept. Private security tried to block all main roads leading to the park, but could not keep people from finding their way through. UC riot police attempted to form a line to keep park defenders back from the fences, brutalizing them with large steel batons; they, too, failed. The fence was finally breached and park defenders entered the park to protect the few remaining trees. At that point, the UC police retreated and Expert Tree Service vacated the park.



Soon, all the fences were completely down. With the space liberated, more community members arrived throughout the day bringing food, water, and medical supplies. By 5 pm, there was a rally on campus and a march in support of People’s Park. Hundreds of people showed up to support and listen to park defenders, some of whom have been defending the park for decades. Park defenders and supporters got to work cutting the felled trees to clear them to the perimeter. Comrades set up medical tables, brought in food, and erected tents that night for anyone who needed shelter. In the face of brutal neoliberal violence, a beautiful and powerful movement of community resistance emerged.


Four excavators that were left behind in the park were beautified. The fences were repurposed to defend a kitchen around a redwood still standing in the middle of the park.



The groups Make UC a Good Neighbor and the People’s Park Historic
District Advocacy Group rushed to court that same day, asking for and achieving a stay of demolition on environmental grounds. Corporate news outlets report that construction is unlikely to resume until October, but the university has shown that it is ready to renew its assault on the park as soon as a court grants them permission.



The Present is a Gift Born from the Cataclysmic Conjuncture of Past and Future

For the past two years, participants in the Ex-Worker Podcast have been touring the globe to screen our documentary, We Are Now, chronicling the police-free zone that arose in response to the fatal police shooting of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta during the George Floyd Uprising.1 For our tastes, there is no greater joy than being able to screen the film in the context of other autonomous, police-free territories in rebellion. When we learned that park-loving people had interrupted the felling of trees and the attempted development of People’s Park at the beginning of August, we had to check it out.

When I arrived, the park reminded me of a sparse Occupy encampment. There was an information table in the middle with Slingshot magazines on it; people were living in tents on one side of the park. Slain trees were strewn all over the area. The trunks of a dozen fallen trees, some over a century old, had been rolled to the perimeter of the park to stop machines from entering. The fences that the university had erected—and people had torn down—now guard a people’s kitchen run by and for the park’s
residents. I knelt down to lay my hand on the trunk of one of the dead trees, feeling the moisture of its exposed entrails. Its red sap ran
viscous, mixing with the blood from a cut on my hand.



While I was there, there was a conflict in the kitchen, while a small meeting of elder park defenders discussed how long they could go without their medicine if they chose to put their bodies on the line for the park. Rather than interrupting their meeting or the argument by the kitchen, I decided to just add my film screening to the whiteboard calendar at the info table. The habitual worry of not asking the right person or group arose in me, but I wanted the park to be the kind of free place where visitors are trusted to feel and expand the vibe, so I went with it. And I was right: it was that free.

I showed up the next day and an enthusiastic park resident helped me clear tree limbs so I could get our van (both the screen and the power source for our screenings) into the park. With just a day’s notice, a few dozen people showed up. They heard about the event through CrimethInc. social media, word of mouth, and their neighborhood tenant organizing Signal groups. Some authority (we’re unsure whether it was the police, the city, or the university) had cut the power to the park’s street lamps, permitting both the requisite darkness for a film screening in the middle of a city as well as the ambience of urban planning gone wrong.

The audience sat atop a broken excavator covered in graffiti while
shooting stars fell overhead and a full moon rose behind the screen. It
was perfect. Every feature was about a plaza (Santiago), park (Istanbul), or lot (Atlanta) reclaimed for the people and defended against police.



The discussion continued well after the movies were over:

“Why was there so much more internationalism in the 2019 revolt in Chile than in the George Floyd uprising?”

“How have people in Istanbul kept Gezi park undeveloped after the uprising sparked by the park’s defense was over?”

“You focused on the spontaneity of the revolt in Chile, but was there any role for planning and imagining a new society that guided it?”

The last question highlighted the importance of places like People’s Park for revolutionaries. In the 2019 uprising in Chile, the people’s rejection of the metro’s fare-hike, martial law, and the president was swift, destructive, and memetic. The most important task at the beginning of the uprising was spreading destruction as far and wide as possible. With the widespread destruction throughout Santiago, it quickly became apparent which areas police and troops had capacity to respond to, and which they didn’t. The spaces and times that no authority had the capacity to respond to then belonged to the people. In that autonomy, any model of collective, territorial resilience in defiance of police and other authority spread like wildfire, whether it was student occupations or landless shanty-dwellers taking a plot. Methods of decision-making, slogans and visions, and a spirit of total freedom that had once been relegated to discrete causes or spaces began to flow through all of society and into these newly liberated spaces. It felt like that spirit could fill the entire world.

We hope that this poster helps unleash the revolutionary spirit of
Rosebud and the decades of struggle that have kept People’s Park free.

Living, breathing examples of free spaces that have triumphed against police and developers are crucial in revolutionary times, and People’s Park is one of those.

Go to People’s Park. Fill it with free activity and joyous encounter. Bring gifts. Bring plans. There’s still a stage, so make music. Kiss under a tree. Meditate in a quiet corner. Share the good stuff. Tend to plants in the garden. Grill it up. Beautify and build defenses. Prepare
to keep the park free from police, construction, boredom, and normalcy. As one enormous banner proclaimed on New Year’s Eve in the Chilean uprising, “We only advance through struggle.”

Further Reading


Click the image to download the zine.


Courtesy of Chronotype Imprint, this zine is a collection of excerpts of interviews with Rosebud’s friends, lovers and accomplices during her time fighting for and living in People’s Park. Everything is selected from the book What Really Killed Rosebud? by Claire Burch.


You can read What Really Killed Rosebud? by Claire Burch here.


  1. Just yesterday, the prosecutor in Atlanta dropped all charges against the police who murdered Rayshard Brooks, showing once again that any consequences for police murderers will have to emerge from outside the judicial system. 

There are 8 Comments

And her murderers must be held accountable before the whole world. The shooter is canine patrol officer Craig Chew of the Oakland Police Department . Remember his name, should be easy: "Chew" is an interesting name for a cop who sics dogs on people. This was at least his 4th reported and investigated police brutality incident. He joined OPD after three excessive force investigations at the Berkeley Police Department, where he apparently wore out his welcome with his violent ways.

The Enemy must learn that killing one of us is an act so expensive they cannot afford to even DREAM of it. Rosebud did everything right: she defied and defeated the institutions that tried to cage her, leaving them holding the empty bag. Not resting on her laurels she continued to fight, defending her community and land. "We are willing to die for this piece of land. Are you?" are the words of warriors everywhere defending their homelands from invasion. Let us remember her in honor, with words, with songs- and with deeds.

so great to hear from another blowhard at the other end of the country. Rosebud broke into a UC administrator's home and was executed as a trespasser with intent to assault. what the hell was she or anyone else thinking would happen? suicide by cop is hardly heroic.

Even under the US's own laws, cops are not supposed to be executioners nor judge and jury. You just admitted canine patrol officer Craig Chew broke his own laws and committed a crime.

Clearly you have no fucking clue about how law enforcement gets away with shit like this every day. I thought you were smarter than that. Oh well.

They thought they would get away with what they did to George Floyd. Their own bullshit laws say they are not supposed to put a knee on someone's neck for 9+ min but the laws are not for them. Only thing is, they are not the only force to be reckoned with. The offending police precinct was burned to the ground followed by a continent-wide Uprising. Furious street battles were fought in almost every city of significance. The fighting in Portland went on for something like a year, and in DC we had daily marches and intermittant battles for three months.

You almost never see buildings set on fire in rioting in DC, but we had two "nights of fire" in a row May 2020. Trump himself was driven into his bunker as fighting raged in Lafayette Sq the first night, prior to any of the fires. Cities rose up and Confederate statues fell, night after night and week after week. Just in DC proper the Albert Pike (Confederate general) statue outside MPD's main headquarters was pulled down by protesters on Juneteenth, landing in front of my feet as I stood just out of bounce range. Three days later a determined attempt to pull down the Andrew Jackson statue was barely defeated by Park Police, and in fighting over the next two days Black Lives Matter Plaza once changed hands three times in one night.

In October, the fallout from this played a role in the siege of DC's own 4th District police station after Karon Hylton was killed by an MPD cop violating the city's no-chase rule. That was for riding a scooter without a helmet. It led to a week-long siege of the precinct, which lost many of its street-facing windows on the second night of fighting and was blasted by a mortar firework so powerful I though it was an IED until I looked at my camera footage (which did not contain any throwers) and could see the colored stars. In person it was an incredibly bright flash and bone-shaking BOOM even at 50+ yards. Cops tried but failed to kettle the furious crowd afterwards, with many on our side fighting on their own turf.

Cops cannot afford much of this kind of "getting away with" anything, as it would quickly reduce all their bases to smoking ruins.

You must feel pretty great from all that winning. Thanks for defeating the police state we are much better off now.

Because of BLM and accelerating after the Uprising in 2020, police departments have run out of people wanting to be cops. Also the morale of many departments has been smashed, and they cannot so easily do shit like "Stop and Frisk" without drawing a hostile crowd.

Back in the Spring, I was in an incident where cops were hassling a Black shopper at a Wal-Mart. I pulled out my camera and started to film. At least five more people did the same, taking a lot of wind out of those cops sails. This would not have happened before Ferguson.

I noticed that some of my own activities that city governments and gentrifiers don't like (details private so as not to give a blueprint to MPD) became MUCH safer, and it was nice knowing the cops we had just run rings around all day were very unlikely to have the energy to go to my places of entertainment for more of the same. Fewer cops, lower morale,weaker enemy. Over time this will have additional favorable effects, such as encouraging gentrifiers not to move into contested neighborhoods while the police are weak.

In desperation we now see things like either the DC cops or Metro's police dept (I forget which one) going all the way to NYC to run ads attempting to poach cops away from the NYPD. This is exactly like what happens to vivisection as an industry when militant animal rights protests on campuses cause students not to pursue vivisection as a course of study.

Now let's look forward, maybe just 5-10 years:

The whole fucking system is starting to come apart at the seams. They have wrecked the environment, gutted the economy, and in the US have also destroyed any semblence of political stability with their incredible greed. They try to use hate to paper over the obscene gaps between rich and poor they have created, but if that shit triggers a civil war they will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. If not, see below. This could go either way but we probably know which one by Jan 20, 2025.

If the government holds together, the environment and/or the economy will likely implode a few years further down the road. In this case, the rich will pursue "fortress environmentalism" attempting to move into relatively small gated communities protected by most of the remaining cops. The rest of us can ignore them if they manage to feed themselves from inside their gates, or beseige them if they attempt "fortress colonialism" as well to import food and fuel. With no relief army ever, they cannot survive a global siege unless they can feed themselves without the rest of us on the outside. We lose the lands they occupy but get the rest back. Main threat here would be if their fortifications get their self-sufficiency from being built over coal/oil/gas deposits and they keep pumping out enough CO2 to drive further climate chaos.

None of these scenarios will let them keep policing everyone else's lives. Only way that happens is a low or high intensity civil war ending in a Fascist victory, followed by some success by the fash in stabilizing both the economy and the environment. That probably requires among other things making fusion energy work. Otherwise they can stablize the economy or the environment but not both no matter what they do. No matter what though, get ready for a very rough ride.

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