Before Kill the Precedent, before Ferguson, before I had the language for most of what this site documents — there was CopBlock. And for those of us who were there during its peak years, roughly 2010 through 2015, it was something genuinely different from anything that had come before in police accountability activism.
I was one of those people. My name appears in a Pete Eyre post from September 2014 about the Missouri police accountability movement — tagged alongside Ferguson, Bryce Masters, Nathan Vickers, and the MO/KS CopBlock network. That was not an accident and it was not incidental. CopBlock was the infrastructure through which a lot of people like me found each other, developed a framework for what we were seeing, and started doing something about it.
This is the story of what CopBlock was, why it worked, and what Kill the Precedent carries forward from that legacy.
How It Started
CopBlock was founded in January 2010 by Pete Eyre — its philosophical architect and the person most responsible for building the ideological and organizational framework that made it spread. Eyre had been traveling the country on a project called Motorhome Diaries — looking for freedom in America and finding instead that freedom was ironically taken by men with uniforms and badges in a place called Jones County, Mississippi. CopBlock was the direct response: a platform to document, share, and hold accountable.
After recognizing the pervasiveness of the problem, CopBlock.org was built as a decentralized network focused on education and police accountability. Pete toured the country — from city to city, state to state, eventually internationally — meeting activists, building relationships, sharing skills, and demonstrating at every stop that ordinary people could be their own accountability infrastructure.
That founding moment matters. This was not a nonprofit formed by lawyers. It was not an advocacy organization launched with a grant. It was two people who had been personally subjected to state violence deciding to build something — and building it in a way that reflected their deepest convictions about how change actually happens.
The Philosophy: Voluntaryism and the Non-Aggression Principle
CopBlock was explicitly and unapologetically rooted in voluntaryism — the philosophical position that all human interactions should be voluntary, that the initiation of force is always wrong regardless of who initiates it, and that the state has no special moral authority to coerce people that individuals do not also possess.
The tagline — "Badges Don't Grant Extra Rights" — was not just a slogan. It was a complete philosophical statement. It said: wearing a costume issued by an institution does not change the moral calculus of your actions. If it is wrong for a private person to detain someone without cause, it is wrong for a person in a uniform to do it. The badge changes the legal consequences. It does not change the ethics.
"My goal is to live in what I call a 'mutual appreciation community.' We care about each other so we look out for each other — so the idea that there's an institution that steals from people under the guise of protecting them is wrong. Any arbitrary authority that says they have the right to control you, the right to control your life… It's something out of love, not anti-police, but out of love."
This framing — out of love, not anti-police — was central to CopBlock's reach. It was not a hate movement. It was a coherent ethical position that made room for everyone who believed in individual rights, regardless of their politics.
The non-aggression principle — that it is immoral to initiate force, threats, or fraud against another person, while self-defense is justified — gave CopBlock an ethical foundation that transcended left-right political categories. The organization applied the libertarian philosophy of the non-aggression principle: that it is immoral and unethical for anyone to initiate aggression against another, whether that's violence, threats or fraud, while self-defense is perfectly justified in response. That's not a left position or a right position. It is a human position. And it drew people from across the political spectrum who would never have otherwise found common cause.
The Decentralized Model: Why It Worked
Most organizations that want to scale build hierarchy. They create presidents and vice presidents and chapters that report upward and require approval and generate paperwork. CopBlock did the opposite — and it worked at a scale that hierarchical organizations rarely achieve.
CopBlock is more an idea than an institution. If you agree that badges don't grant extra rights and you abstain from actions that initiate force, you're welcome to consider yourself part of Cop Block. That's it. That's the membership criteria. No application. No dues. No approval process. No national office that had to vet you. If you believed the thing, you were part of the thing.
The practical implications of this were enormous. There were more than 100 local chapters of CopBlock across the country at the organization's peak — ranging from established groups with regular meetups to a single person running a Facebook page with a handful of followers. The CopBlock Network's purpose was to connect active CopBlockers into a network that creates content, educational materials, and provides assistance to those wronged by police — but crucially noted: "Just because the CopBlock Network exists it doesn't mean CopBlock is not the decentralized organization it was founded to be. You can still start your own group, use CopBlock graphics/logos, film the police and whatever else you can think of."
Pete Eyre wrote about this explicitly. Quoting Julian Assange: "What is happening is that these people are finding each other across the world and across states. We are creating our own computational network of human beings that can think the same way, that can trust each other on a point-to-point basis… an organization starts to form as these people start to find each other locally. As they discover each other they become optimized — that network of nodes starts linking up and becoming more and more efficient at comprehending its environment, planning for action, and then acting."
That is exactly what happened. The 2013 Police Accountability Tour took Pete Eyre from Austin to New York to — Cape Town, South Africa. International. Because the idea traveled without needing permission.
The Role of Reputation in a Voluntary Community
Here is something that centralized organizations often miss: in a voluntary community — one where no one has to be there, where membership is opt-in and exit is always available — reputation is the only real currency.
You cannot compel participation in a voluntaryist organization. You can only earn it. Which means the people who showed up, who did the work, who showed up consistently and treated people with respect and kept their word — those people accumulated something real. Their credibility traveled. Their networks compounded. When Pete Eyre showed up in a city, people came out. Not because he had an organizational title. Because he had earned it through years of doing the work publicly, transparently, and consistently.
This is also why CopBlock at its best worked better than organizations with far more resources. Nobody was there for a paycheck. Nobody was there for career advancement. The people who showed up were there because they believed in the thing — and that self-selection produced a quality of commitment that institutional incentives rarely generate.
This principle — that participation is voluntary, that no one is your boss, and that reputation is built through action not appointment — is one of the most important things CopBlock demonstrated. And it is directly relevant to what Kill the Precedent is trying to build.
What CopBlock Did for Ferguson — and What It Did for Me
When Ferguson happened in August 2014, CopBlock was already there. Not because some national office deployed resources. Because the MO/KS CopBlock network was already active, already connected, already filming. The decentralized infrastructure that Pete Eyre and others had spent four years building meant that when the most significant civil rights moment of the decade happened in my city, there were people who knew what to do, who knew each other, and who understood that documentation was accountability.
I was part of that. My name in a September 2014 Pete Eyre post alongside the Ferguson coverage is not a footnote — it is a record of where this work comes from. The through-line from CopBlock to Kill the Precedent is direct. The belief that accountability requires documentation, that individual rights do not disappear when a badge is present, and that ordinary people can build meaningful accountability infrastructure without waiting for permission — all of that comes from the same source.
The Similarities — and the Extension
CopBlock — The Foundation
Kill the Precedent — The Extension
The difference is scope. CopBlock was focused on law enforcement accountability — specifically the right to film police, know your rights during encounters, and document abuses. Kill the Precedent extends that same philosophical foundation into the child welfare system, family courts, the qualified immunity doctrine, and the institutional patterns that coercive abusers exploit.
Same principle. Broader application. Badges don't grant extra rights — and neither do caseworker IDs, guardian ad litem appointments, or family court bench authority.
What the Decentralized Model Teaches Us About Building Now
CopBlock's success during its peak years demonstrated something that movement builders often resist accepting: people want to help if they feel respected and not pressured. The moment you tell someone what they have to do to be part of something, you lose half the people who would have shown up voluntarily. The moment you create a hierarchy that gives some people authority over others, you attract the people who want authority — which is not always the people you want running things.
The training briefs on this site are free. Not free for approved users. Free. Anyone can print them, share them, use them in a training, hand them to a judge, submit them in a legal proceeding. No permission required. No attribution required beyond a link if possible. Because the goal is for the information to travel — and information travels furthest when it travels free.
The podcast will work the same way. The co-host chair is open. The story submissions are open. The mission is public. Anyone who wants to carry any piece of this forward in their community is welcome to do it. I'm not your boss. I don't have a badge.
Sunlight Is the Greatest Disinfectant
Louis Brandeis wrote in 1913 that sunlight is the best disinfectant and electric light the most efficient policeman. More than a century later it remains the most concise statement of what accountability actually requires: not a better complaint process, not a stronger regulatory agency, not a more sympathetic supervisor — but light. Visibility. The simple, radical act of making what happens in the dark happen in public instead.
CopBlock understood this before most of the institutional accountability movement did. The camera was not incidental to the work — it was the entire strategy. A camera pointed at a police encounter changes the dynamic not because it generates evidence after the fact, but because it removes the conditions under which abuse is most likely to occur. Most people — including most people in authority — behave differently when they know they are being watched.
The livestreaming apps that CopBlock promoted during its peak years — tools that broadcast directly to the internet in real time, removing any possibility of footage being seized or destroyed before it could be seen — were not technical features. They were a philosophy expressed in code. Transparency in real time. No editing window. No opportunity for the footage to disappear between the encounter and the accountability. The record exists the moment it's made, in the hands of the community that witnessed it, beyond the reach of the institution being recorded.
This matters as much now as it did in 2013 — and it matters beyond law enforcement encounters. The same logic applies to CPS home visits. To family court proceedings. To IEP meetings. To any interaction with any government actor who holds power over your life and has an interest in the record reflecting something other than what actually happened.
The current system runs on asymmetric documentation. Caseworkers write notes after visits that you never see. Officers write reports that shape what a prosecutor sees before you've spoken to an attorney. Courts receive records from agencies that you have limited ability to contest. The institutional version of events is built, submitted, and relied upon — while your version lives only in your memory, your word, and whatever fragmented documentation you managed to produce in the chaos of a crisis.
Recording changes that asymmetry. Not completely — power doesn't disappear because a phone is in your hand. But a recording means the interaction has two records instead of one. It means "I said, they said" becomes "here is what was said." It means a caseworker who writes in a report that you were uncooperative has to contend with footage of you being cooperative. It means a court gets to see what you saw — not just what was filed about you.
Kill the Precedent has built a full guide to recording interactions with CPS and law enforcement — what your rights are in every state, how to do it effectively, what apps provide the best protection, and how to use recordings as evidence. Because this is not a niche skill for activists anymore. It is a survival skill for anyone who interacts with government institutions that have the power to separate families.
Read the Full Recording Guide →CopBlock eventually wound down — sold, hollowed out, its local chapters mostly dead by 2017. The people who wrote most honestly about what happened named activist burnout and personality conflicts. Both are real. Both are predictable. And both are addressed — imperfectly, but intentionally — by the voluntaryist model itself.
When no one is your boss, you can put the work down when you need to and pick it back up when you can. When participation is voluntary, you don't burn out carrying obligations you didn't sign up for. When reputation is the currency, there is no incentive to fake engagement — you either show up or you don't, and the community sees it either way.
Kill the Precedent is built to last longer than CopBlock did — not because it's better organized, but because it's built around content that doesn't require any individual person's constant presence to remain useful. The research database doesn't need me to be active for it to be cited in a court filing. The training briefs don't need me to be online for a caseworker to print one and put it on their desk. The legal frameworks don't expire.
The ideas, as the stencil on Pete Eyre's black SUV said, are bulletproof.