Biden Announces Plan for Nationwide Police Offensive for This Summer
| revcom.us
On June 23, Joe Biden announced a “comprehensive strategy” by his administration to infuse massive funding to police in cities across the country.1 The plan is said to be aimed at “combat(ting) gun violence and other violent crime.” Its core goal is to use “historic funding levels” from money for COVID-19 pandemic response to “put more police officers on the street” with increased “resources, training and accountability.” The plan explicitly aims to increase the number of cops prowling city streets and neighborhoods as summer begins, when it says cities “typically experience a spike in violence.” The plan also includes heightened federal restrictions on and monitoring of gun sales and funding for some social programs, such as programs for people recently released from prison.
The Biden White House claims that the plan will “reduce violent crime” by attacking its “root causes.” First of all, by “violent crime,” they definitely are not referring to the plague of violence by the police that is terrorizing Black, Brown, and Native American people across the country. Biden’s summer offensive to shore up the police will only intensify that violence. As Bob Avakian (BA) points out:
The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness. (BAsics 1:24)
But what about other crimes that do affect ordinary people, as well as violence among the people, especially the oppressed youth in the inner cities? When Biden says his plan will get to the “root cause” of crime, he is not referring to the capitalist-imperialist system of exploitation, oppression, and institutionalized white supremacy, enforced by the police, sheriffs, marshals and other pigs, that he presides over. Nor is Joe Biden speaking of the way in which the workings of that system have shifted production to oppressed nations where workers can be even more intensely exploited. Nor of the ways that health care, education, reasonably priced and nutritious food, recreation and other things essential to human life have been systematically stripped from Black and Latino neighborhoods. While unlike Trump and the fascists, Biden and the Democrats do not openly praise pigs for their wanton brutality and encourage them to do even more, they fundamentally do not have any solutions that are in the actual interests of the people.
What Bob Avakian digs into in his piece “Police and Prisons: Reformist Illusions and the Revolutionary Solution” is very relevant around this:
... the ruling powers of this system need this kind of brutal police force not only to violently enforce racial oppression, as significant as that is. This system rests upon, and continually gives rise to, social divisions and conflicts—between masses of people and the ruling class, and among the masses of people themselves—conflicts which hold the potential for, and frequently erupt into violence and “chaos,” which in some circumstances can reach dimensions that threaten the “stability” of the system. So the capitalist ruling class requires a force of organized institutionalized violence—the police (as well as the military)—to contain and control these conflicts, and to forcibly suppress them when they erupt into violence and “chaos” that does immediately, or potentially, threaten the “established order.” Even with real, and in some ways sharp, differences among them, about some of the particulars of how this should be carried out, the entire ruling class is in fundamental agreement on the need for this, because once again it flows from and corresponds to the fundamental nature and requirements of this system.
Biden’s latest pro-pig offensive is proof of that.
1. White House Fact Sheet: Biden-Harris Administration Announces Comprehensive Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gun Crime and Ensure Public Safety. [back]
Biden's plan explicitly aims to increase the number of cops prowling city streets and neighborhoods as summer begins, when it says cities “typically experience a spike in violence.” Above: Minneapolis, May 30, 2020, police line after firing barrage of tear gas at protesters. Photo: Screengrab CNN
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