By the time Rebekah Jones had been arrested, I was already suffering from the consequences of my 3rd COVID infection as a hospital worker. I was still trying to push through my newfound disabilities, but by 2021 next year, I would quit US healthcare entirely. Our Southern California hospital suffered a tremendous strain caring for the influx of patients not only from our own nearby communities, but those of other regions—at one point we were taking in patients airlifted from Sacramento, some 400 miles/640 kilometres away, because all the hospitals geographically north of us had no available beds. Just imagine that. A 400-mile span and no hospitals available.

From the start, I intended this image to be able to be widely shared on social media: #FreeRebekahJones on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. hence making a square image.

I had just finished my first exploration of Rick Poyner’s monograph on David King! Designer, Activist, Visual Historian, and King’s works would heavily influence my design composition.

The first thing I did was grab a still from police footage of her arrest, compose it within a square canvas, then quickly scribbled in the rectangles where the text would go. I already had the exact text in mind: HANDS OFF! Rebekah Jones, POLICE REPRESSION, ORGANISE, UNITE. Using Jones’s own name as a censor bar to cover her eyes was the first idea I had, and it was then on I used yellow for police tape. The SS in REPRESSION is obviously evocative of the SS, with the whole text barring freedom of movement. The original footage was so low-resolution, I had to apply a screentone dots overlay to conceal the artefacts from the original film.

I republish below the statement I sent in support of Jones to the World Socialist Website, in the same week of her raid.

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Capitalism has no answer to a tsunami of preventable deaths but violent repression of anyone who brings these crimes to light.  Jones and other whistleblowers like her deserve our unequivocal support.

Trump’s lackey DeSantis may be the one who directed this particular violent act of state censorship against Jones, but I have no doubt that the Democrats would’ve done nothing essentially different. President Obama told the people of Flint to let their kids eat lead paint and drink toxic water. The Democrats were active accomplices in the deployment of the National Guard and six dozen police agencies to maim water protectors during the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests. There’s no constituency for the defense of public health in either party.

One of her recent findings was that 51 out of 67 counties in Florida have zero available pediatric ICU beds. That’s not something the mainstream media wants to report on. They want children back in school even if that means sending them and their families to the pediatric ICU—some of those beds are being allocated to adult patients, as hospitals are running out of room in other wards.

They—the media—would rather smear Jones for completely unrelated dropped charges, than indict actual policies soaked with the blood of hundreds of thousands.

To defend their lives and the scientists that expose these assaults on public health—you described it succinctly as a policy of “malign neglect”—workers have to organize on their own initiative. Anyone else committed to an honest accounting of reality, including artists and other researchers, must rally to Jones’s defense. No one else will do so. DeSantis certainly doesn’t care about our lives.

And this is just the start. What they did to Jones—they’ll do to anyone who threatens their bottom line.