Enough Is Enough Rochester

[TODO: Description of EIE]

I joined EIE in 2019 after a friend close to me was assaulted by police during a “wellness check”. (Was not the first or last person I know that happened to in the Rochester area, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.) I started getting up to speed with the various ways EIE helps people and the initiatives they were involved with, and most notably, got involved with the effort to establish the Rochester Police Accountability Board.

When I took over as EIE's webmaster and social media manager, one of my first actions was to refine and unify the existing visual identity, and make it easier for people to engage from modern devices and platforms, while keeping it entirely recognizable to long-time members.

I created a refined version of the main EIE profile image to use across all social media, as well as a version for platforms that crop it to a circle. I also created header graphic variants to use on forms and other standalone pages, and a version designed to overlay the photos featured in the website's header. The header was previously around 280px tall, and I combined elements to bring it closer to 140px. The new version allowed more content to surface “above the fold”, and it was also able to scale better to support mobile devices.

A made various other visual changes to the website that fixed issues with usability on mobile devices, better helped main content stand out from secondary elements, and unified the set of colors used. I also refactored various parts of the WordPress theme under the hood to reduce duplicate code and generally make the site more maintainable. Notably, I rebuilt pages with WordPress Blocks so they could more easily be modified by people without coding experience, combined the previously separate desktop and mobile footers to be one implementation that reflowed responsively. I also changed up the navigation links to make it easier for people to contact or get involved with EIE, including a greater focus on the Slack chat after the pandemic hit.

In parallel to that, I revamped and revitalized EIE's social media presence. In addition to unifying aspects of the existing Facebook and Twitter pages, I created an Instagram profile (and later Mastodon) to better connect with people—especially younger people—who were interested in police accountability, but not as active on Facebook as existing EIE members (at time of writing, EIE has ≈1,000 Instagram followers). I shared my own updates on EIE news and actions in Rochester, but I also connected with relevant individual activists, representatives of related organizations, and members of City Council to both bring their relevant updates to EIE members and connect EIE members to those relevant people and organizations.

That social media presence was, of course, especially valuable during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, during which I communicated with and helped signal boost the leaders of local BLM organizations. That coordination and careful consideration became even more important after we learned about the killing of Daniel Prude. And even after the protests stopped, EIE's work continued

Throughout my work with EIE, beyond relevant technical and writing skills, I have found the blend of strong personal values plus open curiosity to be extremely beneficial, helping me empathize with people's situations and support their rights without flexing on other values important to me. Obviously strong values are beneficial in a political fight against strong opposing forces, but that blend has also helped me in moments that were tricker to navigate. For instance, I quickly picked up on it when one person who came to us after being mistreated by the police made some subtly queerphobic remarks. I absolutely supported xer right to not be mistreated by the police, but I also made sure all associated EIE statements wholeheartedly supported that right without in anyway expressing support for xer personal views, which, unfortunately, turned out to be a very good call.

Unfortunately, due to too many members having too little bandwidth after family and job commitments, and a lack of new members joining to share the work, EIE's regular operations went on indefinite hiatus in 2023, though I do still monitor the social media accounts and respond to the occasional messages we receive as best I can.