Cops Can't Do Their Job on Video—Then What IS Their "Job"?!
October 28, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On October 23, FBI Director James Comey gave a major speech at the University of Chicago Law School. A few days later he repeated the basic thrust of it to the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
This speech is filled with distortions, half-truths and outright lies; it is a poisonous and deceitful attack on the righteous struggle to stop police terror directed at Black and Brown people.
We cannot take apart this whole pile of bullshit right now. But let’s just look at one segment which has been widely replayed and talked about on FOX News and other media outlets and has spread across the Internet—the part where he complains about the so-called “Ferguson Effect” (the “theory” that protest against police terror is causing violent crime to skyrocket).
In it, Comey talks about how the poor little piggies are now scared to get out of their cars because the youth are threatening them with… cellphone video cameras!*
Really?!? You can’t “do your job” because someone might video it and… then what? They would see that your job is actually one of needless and utterly illegal and illegitimate humiliation and brutalization of Black and Latino people?
Really, come on—you’re going to admit that? You can’t even be as accountable as a football referee?
What does that say about the “job” of the police—that is, the functioning and role of the police in crushing the spirits and hamstringing the lives of the oppressed masses?
It says exactly that what Bob Avakian has been saying for decades is the cold truth:
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 order that enforces all this oppression and madness. (BAsics 1:24)
*Comey’s actual words from the speech: “I spoke to officers privately in one big city precinct who described being surrounded by young people with mobile phone cameras held high, taunting them the moment they get out of their cars. They told me, ‘We feel like we’re under siege and we don’t much like getting out of our cars’” [back]
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