Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

When it comes to transportation, cars are rarely safe to use near the scene of the crime: they're tagged for easy identification by your enemies, and those enemies have dominion over almost all the places you can drive them, too. If you use them, try to make sure that your driver is the least likely of you to be arrested before your getaway, and that your drop-off and pick-up points are out of sight from where the action goes down; you can use a stolen license plate or obscure your plate with mud, but check out the potential legal consequences first to make sure it's worth the risk. If you are on foot and hoping to stay out of sight, and your driver is roving the area waiting to pick you up when you're ready, you could leave a marker out at the pick-up point until you arrive there, remove it, and hide nearby until the car pulls over.

Bicycles are often useful, as they are quiet, easy to conceal, can go places cars cannot, and can be abandoned in an emergency. Even though they don't have registration to give them away, they can still be connected to you by description, so either use a bicycle other than your own, or stash it someplace where you can get on it out of sight of pursuers and ride away unobserved. Leave your bicycle unlocked for quickest accessibility. There's always public transportation, though it can be unreliable and you probably don't want anyone to be able to identify you as having been near the scene of the crime. If those pursuing you are in vehicles, you can slow them down by pulling obstacles into their path.

If you're surrounded and there's no way out of an area, you can always find a good hiding place and sit tight. Remember when choosing hiding places and escape routes that if you are chased by pohce at night, they vidll probably use spotlights to follow you.

So many have escaped the claws of so-called justice by leaping into dumpsters that it's practically a coming-of-age ritual in some circles. In Miami, fleeing from a charging force of three thousand police fanning out across the district in cars, tanks, and bicycle brigades, my affinity group found ourselves encircled on all sides, with police on every street ahead of, around, and behind us; we fled into a small alley, and hid there among weeds and trash for several hours until night fell and the police lines moved forward, leaving us to sneak away in tremidous pairs.

Don't rule out the possibility that locals will help you out of a tight spot, either, though some are more likely to do so than others. We wouldn't have known which way to go out of the aforementioned alley if neighborhood locals hadn't been waiting to guide us to safety; of course, that was an impoverished black ghetto, and things might have played out differently in a bourgeois suburb. You may also be able to pass yourself off as a customer in a bar or club, if you're not breathing too heavily.

If you're in foreign territory, try to make sure you have somewhere to go if you can't get back together wdth your partners. I'll never forget the night I got chased by a police car after putting up graffiti for the next day's demonstration; it was a rainy January night, and of course I shed my outer layers of clothing in the course of flight, so it was a cold, wet eight hours walking around back streets kiUing time until the demonstration started.

If you're carrying potentially incriminating evidence that doesn't bear your fingerprints, and there's any chance you will be caught, dispose of it in the safest place you can in the course of your flight. Better you don't have it on you if they do get you; you can come back to the scene later, if possible, and remove it. Wear layers of clothing?better yet, a persuasive wig?that you can strip off as soon as you're out of eyesight; just make sure when you come out looking like a different person, you do so in character, not running desperately in the same direction you were a second earlier!

Evasion 237

You can create a distraction by

announcing that you've lost a

contact lens and insisting that

everyone help you find it, or at

least stay off a given floorspace.

Evasion

2)8

Post lookouts, either immediately around the field of engagement, or at a distance with communications equipment; make sure they can't easily be associated with the one doing the action, not least so they can pull the "she went that-a-way" trick if the chance arises. If you're the one going for it, don't let your guard down just because you have lookouts?^you never know what will happen. If you're a lookout, don't panic and run just because the one you were watching on behalf of is running.