Pyro's Patriots

Pyro's Patriots Pyro’s Patriots is an artist collective, mutual aid network, and grassroots crew based in Canton, Ohio. We Got Us. The Fire Won't Die.

We organize community support, create art and music, and show up when people need help.

They came for us but we won.
06/17/2026

They came for us but we won.

A mental health crisis should not be a death sentence.A traffic stop should not be a death sentence.A welfare check shou...
06/17/2026

A mental health crisis should not be a death sentence.

A traffic stop should not be a death sentence.

A welfare check should not be a death sentence.

But in America, we keep sending armed officers into situations that need care, de-escalation, housing support, trained crisis workers, medics, or sometimes just time and space. Then we act shocked when the badge turns a crisis into a body bag.

Roughly 23–32% of fatal police shooting victims were experiencing a mental health crisis at the time, often involving suicidal ideation. That means people in some of the most fragile moments of their lives are being met by a system built around control, commands, force, and compliance.

And the numbers get even uglier.

One recent accounting found that 67% of all police killings started as traffic stops, mental health or welfare calls, or situations where the person was not reportedly threatening anyone with a gun.

Read that again.

Not an active shooter.
Not a hostage situation.
Not some fantasy cop-show battlefield.

Traffic stops. Welfare checks. Mental health crises. People not reportedly threatening anyone with a gun.

This is what happens when we pretend police are the universal answer to every social problem. Broken taillight? Send a gun. Suicidal crisis? Send a gun. Someone acting erratically? Send a gun. Poverty spillover? Send a gun. Addiction? Send a gun. Homelessness? Send a gun.

Then politicians call it “public safety” while the public keeps dying.

We do not need more money poured into the same machine and then sprinkled with a little “training” like parsley on a co**se. We need non-police crisis response. We need mental health teams. We need harm reduction. We need housing. We need traffic enforcement that does not turn minor violations into funerals. We need systems that treat crisis like crisis, not combat.

People in crisis deserve care.

Drivers deserve to get home.

Families deserve help that does not arrive with a loaded weapon and leave with condolences.


Harvard’s fi****ms research page summarizes a study of fatal police shootings from 17 states in 2014–2015 and says 32% of victims showed signs of a mental health crisis; a 2024 peer-reviewed article says open-source studies have found about one in five people shot and killed by police may have been experiencing a mental health crisis.
For the 67% figure, the 2025 Police Violence Report says 67% of killings by police in 2025, or 760 deaths, were traffic stops, police responses to mental health crises, or situations where the person was not reportedly threatening anyone with a gun.

Mass incarceration is the legal afterlife of slavery with paperwork.People love to say slavery ended in 1865, but the 13...
06/17/2026

Mass incarceration is the legal afterlife of slavery with paperwork.

People love to say slavery ended in 1865, but the 13th Amendment did not fully abolish slavery. It abolished slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime.” That exception clause is not symbolic. It is the legal doorway that allows forced prison labor to exist in the United States.

Now look at who gets pushed through that doorway.

Black and Hispanic/Latino communities are not accidentally overrepresented in prisons and jails. This is what happens when policing, poverty, sentencing laws, bail, probation traps, drug war policy, and racial bias all feed the same machine.

In 2023, Black adults were imprisoned in state or federal prison at a rate of 1,218 per 100,000. White adults were imprisoned at 231 per 100,000. Hispanic adults were imprisoned at 606 per 100,000. That means Black adults were imprisoned at more than five times the rate of white adults, and Hispanic adults at more than two and a half times the rate of white adults.

In local jails, the damage is just as loud. At midyear 2024, 38% of people in local jails were Black and 15% were Hispanic. And 69% of the jail population was unconvicted, meaning many people were sitting in cages before being convicted of anything.

Then comes the labor.

The ACLU found that about 800,000 incarcerated people work behind bars. Many are paid pennies per hour. Some states pay nothing for most prison work. More than three quarters of incarcerated workers surveyed said they could be punished for refusing or being unable to work, including solitary confinement, loss of family visits, or loss of sentence reductions.

Call that what it is: coerced labor under threat of punishment.

This country cages Black and Brown people at wildly unequal rates, strips them of rights, extracts labor from them, pays them little or nothing, then calls it “justice.”

That is not rehabilitation.
That is not public safety.
That is not freedom.

That is a legal slave economy dressed in uniforms, courtrooms, and “tough on crime” language.

If we are serious about justice, we have to be serious about ending forced prison labor, ending racial sentencing disparities, ending cash bail, ending the war on poor communities, and removing the slavery exception from every constitution where it still hides.

Slavery did not disappear.
It changed clothes.

Sources: Library of Congress, Bureau of Justice Statistics, ACLU, U.S. Sentencing Commission, Prison Policy Initiative.

When people say Black neighborhoods were “flooded with crack,” don’t let anyone reduce that to a wild conspiracy so they...
06/16/2026

When people say Black neighborhoods were “flooded with crack,” don’t let anyone reduce that to a wild conspiracy so they can dodge the truth.

The documented reality is ugly enough.

Black communities were flooded with drugs, then flooded again with police, prosecutors, mandatory minimums, raids, surveillance, prison time, and moral panic. The War on Drugs did not rescue Black neighborhoods. It turned pain into policy and addiction into a cage.

Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one” in 1971. By the 1980s and 1990s, the War on Drugs had become a machine of criminalization. The National Academies found that drug policy changes intensified punishment, increased drug arrests, and helped drive racial disparities in incarceration.

Then came crack sentencing. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act treated 1 gram of crack like 100 grams of powder co***ne. Same drug family. Wildly different punishment. Crack was associated in public fear campaigns with poor Black neighborhoods. Powder co***ne was more associated with wealthier, whiter users. The result was predictable: harsher punishment for the communities already being targeted.

And no, the government’s hands are not clean when it comes to the crack era. Investigations into the CIA-Contra-crack allegations did not prove that the CIA directly ordered crack into Black neighborhoods. But official and declassified records do show something rotten: U.S. officials knew about allegations of Contra-linked drug trafficking, dealt with people and networks tied to drug trafficking allegations, and still treated Black communities like the enemy once the drugs hit the street.

That is the part people want us to forget.

They want us to believe drugs simply “appeared” in Black neighborhoods, police simply “responded,” and prisons simply “filled up.” But policy made choices. Law enforcement made choices. Congress made choices. Prosecutors made choices. Media made choices. Those choices devastated families.

Black and white Americans use drugs at roughly similar rates, yet Black people have been arrested, charged, sentenced, and incarcerated at wildly unequal rates. That was not an accident. That was design by impact, even when they deny design by intent.

The War on Drugs was never just a war on drugs.

It was a war on Black neighborhoods.
A war on poor people.
A war on survival.
A war that punished addiction harder than it punished poverty, corruption, or state neglect.

And the wreckage is still here.

Sources: National Academies of Sciences, U.S. Sentencing Commission, DOJ Inspector General, CIA Inspector General materials, National Security Archive, The Sentencing Project, ACLU.

Black men in America are not “overreacting.” They are surviving a country where a police encounter can become a death se...
06/16/2026

Black men in America are not “overreacting.” They are surviving a country where a police encounter can become a death sentence.
In 2025, police killed 1,314 people in the United States. That is not “a few bad apples.” That is one person killed by law enforcement about every 6.67 hours. In 2024, the number was even worse: 1,365 people, the deadliest year since Mapping Police Violence began tracking in 2013.
And the racial disparity is not imaginary. Black people were 2.6 times more likely than white people to be killed by police in 2025. In 2024, they were 2.9 times more likely. The Washington Post’s police shooting database found that Black Americans are about 14% of the U.S. population but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans. Over 95% of people fatally shot by police are male.
Let that sit in your chest: Black men are being forced to carry a risk that no human being should have to normalize. A PNAS study estimated that a Black man in the U.S. faces about a 1 in 1,000 lifetime chance of being killed by police. That is not public safety. That is state violence wearing a badge and asking us to call it order.
Every time this happens, the same tired script gets dragged out: “comply better,” “wait for the facts,” “he must have done something.” But the facts are already screaming. Year after year, the numbers show the same brutal pattern. Black men are policed harder, feared faster, dehumanized quicker, and mourned only after the system has already tried to put them on trial from the grave.
We do not need more empty speeches. We need accountability. We need transparency. We need consequences when police kill. We need investment in mental health response, housing, poverty reduction, community safety, and systems that do not treat Black life as disposable.
Black men deserve to grow old.
Black boys deserve to come home.
Black families deserve more than hashtags, bodycam footage, and another name added to the altar of America’s refusal to change.
Sources: Mapping Police Violence / Campaign Zero, Washington Post Police Shootings Database, PNAS study on lifetime risk of being killed by police.
Fact base: Campaign Zero/Mapping Police Violence reported 1,314 police killings in 2025, a 5% decrease from 2024, and said Black people were 2.6x more likely than white people to be killed by police. It also reported 1,365 police killings in 2024, the highest since its records began, with Black people 2.9x more likely to be killed. The Washington Post database says Black Americans are roughly 14% of the population but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans, and that over 95% of fatal police shooting victims are male. The 2019 PNAS study estimated Black men face about a 1 in 1,000 lifetime risk of being killed by police.
**k12

Been in the lab ! Here's what is now officially Officer Oink ! See the next post for the meme!!!!!
06/16/2026

Been in the lab ! Here's what is now officially Officer Oink ! See the next post for the meme!!!!!

06/16/2026

Pyro's Patriots defended on the plaza find our work take a pic win a prize prize everytime

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06/11/2026

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06/07/2026

Vote for the f**k 12 party

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