Ending Police Murder...
This System Has NO Answers—the REVOLUTION DOES
February 2, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Five months since the country erupted in determined protest, against police brutality and murder… This system has NO real answers:
“Body cameras are the solution...”
Video frame shows Cleveland police shooting Tamir Rice only seconds after they drove up at the park.
People courageously risk their lives to document police brutality and murder on video, and doing this shines a light on the crimes carried out by the police and makes it possible to mobilize people in the struggle for justice. But the police continue to kill – even on video: 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland was killed by police two seconds after they rolled up on him playing on a playground. Eric Garner was choked to death in New York City while the pig who killed him smiled at the camera. And if the body cams are on police, all they have to do is “forget” to turn them on or discover that the cameras “malfunctioned” after they brutalize and kill. Body cameras will not solve the problem of police killing people.
“Police need better training...”
Carl Dix asks “How much training do you need to not murder people?” When the police murder someone’s child, usually Black or Latino, when those police are applauded and hailed as heroes, when the legal system does not prosecute them for the real crime of murder... this IS training.
Anthony Rosario and Hilton Vega were murdered by NYPD detectives in 1995. The Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), after an investigation, asked that the case be reopened but the Police Department refused. Instead, there was a cover up, and then a cover up of the cover up. All the people on the CCRB who worked on the case are either forced to resign or are fired.
“Civilian Review Boards are the answer...”
In response to anger over police brutality, and in some cases in the face of opposition by police, city after city set up some kind of Civilian Review Board that is supposed to check police brutality.But where these review boards exist, the bitter truth is they have very little impact at all on the epidemic of police violence. When they find police guilty of brutality and crimes, those findings typically lead to either a slap on the wrist or no penalty at all.
“We need more federal investigations...”
Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton was murdered in his sleep in Chicago in 1969 as part of the Cointelpro operation of the FBI. This was covered up for years by authorities on the Federal level. AP photo
At times the federal Department of Justice shows up in cases of police murder—usually when people’s anger at police murder threatens to get out of control. But the police keep killing people with impunity. Example: On November 15, 2006, Sean Bell was gunned down in a hail of 50 bullets by plainclothes and undercover NYPD cops. Sean Bell was an unarmed Black man. After years of protest, and after a judge found the murdering cops not guilty, the Justice Department conducted an “investigation” and announced there would be no charges because “Neither accident, mistake, fear, negligence or bad judgment is sufficient to establish a federal criminal civil rights violation." In other words, police can kill a Black man and claim it was an “accident,” a “mistake”, they were afraid, or they used “bad judgment,” and that’s enough to get a license to kill Black people renewed by the Justice Department. There is no justice from the Department of Justice. For more background on what the Department of “Justice” is all about, see “Lessons of the People’s Struggles: The FBI and the Feds—Not Friends but Vicious Enemies.”
“They need to hire more Black and Latino police...”
A Black woman cop supervised the murder of Eric Garner. That did not “take race out of the equation.” What it did was demonstrate, once again, why more Black police are not the solution to the police murder of Black people.
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.
Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, BAsics 1:24
The revolution DOES have answers:
Editor’s note: Tyisha Miller was a 19-year-old African-American woman shot dead by Riverside, California police in 1998. Miller had been passed out in her car, resulting from a seizure, when police claimed that she suddenly awoke and had a gun; they fired 23 times at her, hitting her at least 12 times, and murdering her. Bob Avakian addressed this.
If you can’t handle this situation differently than this, then get the fuck out of the way. Not only out of the way of this situation, but get off the earth. Get out of the way of the masses of people. Because, you know, we could have handled this situation any number of ways that would have resulted in a much better outcome. And frankly, if we had state power and we were faced with a similar situation, we would sooner have one of our own people’s police killed than go wantonly murder one of the masses. That’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re actually trying to be a servant of the people. You go there and you put your own life on the line, rather than just wantonly murder one of the people. Fuck all this “serve and protect” bullshit! If they were there to serve and protect, they would have found any way but the way they did it to handle this scene. They could have and would have found a solution that was much better than this. This is the way the proletariat, when it’s been in power has handled—and would again handle—this kind of thing, valuing the lives of the masses of people. As opposed to the bourgeoisie in power, where the role of their police is to terrorize the masses, including wantonly murdering them, murdering them without provocation, without necessity, because exactly the more arbitrary the terror is, the more broadly it affects the masses. And that’s one of the reasons why they like to engage in, and have as one of their main functions to engage in, wanton and arbitrary terror against the masses of people.
BAsics 2:16 by Bob Avakian
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