The Problem Is NOT "Anti-Police Rhetoric"...
The Problem Is the Murdering Pigs

September 14, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

A growing crescendo of cops, their supporters, and the powers-that-be are insisting that a big problem in society is not that the police are murdering Black and Latino people, but that the police are themselves victims of what presidential candidate Mike Huckabee called a climate of “violence, chaos, and disrespect” towards police. They have organized “Blue Lives Matter” rallies in Washington, DC, and in Maryland, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Texas, and many other states.

They have been making ominous threats against people advocating and participating in resistance to police terror. They make the outrageous and dangerous accusation that those who use and popularize the hashtag and chant “Black Lives Matter” are engaging in “hate speech.”

Scott Walker, another Republican running for president, recently said a “rise in anti-police rhetoric” is behind “a disturbing trend of police officers being murdered on the job.” Ron Hickman, sheriff of Harris County, Texas, said the “rhetoric” of people protesting police brutality and murder by police has escalated “to the point where calculated, cold-blooded assassination of police officers happens.”

Two things to say about all this.

#1: It is bullshit. Any time a cop is killed it is amplified loudly and endlessly in all the bourgeois media. When police murder people, those people are hardly mentioned, unless there is a video or determined protest. More than 800 people have been murdered by police so far this year in the U.S. Fascists like Huckabee and the cops who moan and groan and get endless air time about a supposed “trend” of increased violence against police are straight up lying, and they know it. Society’s “trend” is mounting police violence, including murder, against the masses of people. Meanwhile, 16 cops have died from gunfire all this year, and it is unclear from the police’s own accounts how many of them died from the fusillades of bullets unleashed by their fellow cops.

And the reality is that there is a “rising trend” of police violence against people, particularly Black and Latino youth. So far in September alone, 32 people have been killed by police, and that number will almost certainly have risen by the time you read this.

#2: It is part of a seriously dangerous political and ideological counter-offensive attempting to isolate, confuse, frighten, and derail the entire mass movement against police brutality and murder at a time when it must make a giant advance forward and attain much greater societal impact. It is aimed at strengthening the ability of the police to brutalize, murder, harass, and arrest people, and to have a free hand in suppressing resistance to their brutality and murder.

An Intolerable Situation

On September 5, police in Virginia Beach shot 30 bullets into a car driven by 28-year-old India Kager, killing her and Angelo Perry, her husband. Police gave the pathetically shameful and vicious justification that they trailed Kager and Perry and opened fire on them because they had “credible information that he [Perry] was going to commit a violent act...”

Kager and Perry are but two of the more than 800 people murdered by police this year.

Out of these hundreds of murders committed by police this year alone, how many of the killers have even faced an interrogation?

Out of the thousands murdered by police over the past decade, how many of the cops who killed them have been prosecuted, much less convicted? How many have of the killers been sent to prison?

You won’t need a calculator to answer that. You won’t need more than the fingers on one hand.

This situation is intolerable! Being angry about it is completely legitimate! Being determined to resist and to STOP it is completely justified! Finding a way to accommodate to it, trying to tone down your fury, trying to make your protest and resistance acceptable to the powers that be, attempting to somehow find “common ground” with the armed forces of the state who are gunning down and brutalizing our youth every single fucking day—now that’s shameful and cowardly.

All the attention paid to this lie of the supposedly growing attacks on cops covers up the mounting violence and including murder the police inflict on the people. It focuses people on a non-problem, and gets people asking the wrong questions. The problem is the sustained, systemic, and increasing violence against Black and Latino people that is deeply ingrained in the entire fabric of this system, is carried out mainly by the police, and is “justified” time and again in the legal system.

Being a Black or Latino person, especially a youth, has gotten much more dangerous over the past few decades. Literally millions of youth have been pulled over, harassed, beaten, and often arrested by stop-and-frisk programs in New York and other cities. More than 2.2 million people are in prison in the U.S., and they are disproportionately Black and Latino. More than 80,000 people are held in the torture of solitary confinement every day in this country. And it is a cold, sobering fact that an average of more than three people are killed each and every day by police in this country.

The vicious, deceitful ideological assault in defense of the police is aimed at perpetuating and intensifying exactly this intolerable situation.

 

 

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