Whenever systemic police brutality and institutional racism get widely exposed, and especially when there is mass resistance, one of the go-to moves of the authorities is to replace the white police chief with a Black chief in order to bamboozle and pacify people who are so caught up in identity politics that they think “inclusion” in the racist institutions of a racist system will somehow make a meaningful change. In reality, the pigs they appoint almost always go along with the program, and in some cases are even worse: witness the “Black Giuliani” of New York, Eric Adams, who went from being a pig to being a legislator to being the mayor of NYC—and proceeded to bring back the worst kind of shit that people in New York endured under his predecessors.

But once in a very great while, someone slips through who actually takes the idea of reform seriously. So it’s interesting to see what happens to them. Case in point, Charlottesville, Virginia.

Charlottesville: A Case Study

You remember Charlottesville, don’t you? That’s where hundreds of pro-Trump Nazis, in August 2017, marched through the University of Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us,” surrounding and terrorizing a group of students and activists; then the next day, Klansmen and other MAGA fascists waged pitched battles in defense of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee statue, while white supremacist thugs mercilessly beat an unarmed Black man, Deandre Harris, in a nearby parking garage, and plowed a car into a crowd of heroic anti-racist, anti-fascist resisters, murdering Heather Heyer and injuring dozens.

When all this was happening, remember where the Charlottesville police were? Standing on the sidelines and letting it all happen!

As the dust settled, and the eyes of the world were focused on Charlottesville, it came out that, lo and behold, this “idyllic” college town had rampant inequality and discrimination against Black people in housing, education, and policing—a city where Black people make up 20 percent of the population but 80 percent of the people who police “stop and frisk.”

Soon after, the white police chief was out and a Black police chief, RaShall Brackney—a liberal Democrat and advocate of “progressive policing”—was brought in. Right off the bat, as she describes in a Washington Post article, she was met with hostility by a police department that is almost 90 percent white and mostly men. When she introduced herself to one commander, he replied, “I voted Republican, and I don’t drink any fucking pumpkin lattes.”

But the real problems began when she started reorganizing the department, withdrawing a number of cops from a drug task force that she said was going after too many low-level users rather than dealers, pulling police out of schools, and especially when she investigated and disciplined members of the SWAT team who were sharing homophobic, misogynist, and racist videos and text messages. One video appeared to show a cop teaching a trainee how to cover up misconduct. Another video showed a cop saying he wanted to get back to doing “gangster shit.” Text messages showed a cop saying he wanted to “take out” the “top four.” In light of all this, Brackney said she feared for her family, installed a new alarm system on her house, and began to carry her gun unholstered every night as she walked to her car. Finally she decided to disband the SWAT team altogether.

The retaliation was swift. The president of the Central Virginia pig union sent a letter to the city saying, “The men and women of the Charlottesville Police Department are hurting…. We have lost faith in our leadership.” Then the pig union released a “survey” of the department, in which 90 percent of the cops surveyed said they’d reduced their normal policing activities for “fear of being targeted by community groups.” Finally, top leaders in the department threatened to resign if Brackney remained. Then on September 1, 2021, the city manager fired Brackney.

Brackney is currently filing a lawsuit against the city of Charlottesville. As she told the Washington Post: “The city of Charlottesville and CPD was and still is so invested in its racial paternalism, misogyny and nepotism, they would rather conspire to oust me than dismantle or confront corrupt, violent individuals in CPD and city government,”

Is this just a Charlottesville problem? Is this just an issue of police unions having too much power? Why did the city cave in to these sniveling, snarling pigs? What are the REAL lessons we should draw from this story?

The Real Lessons

1) The culture of the police is a product of the role that the police play. The racism, the “us vs. them” war mentality, as Brackney described it, is a feature, not a bug. As Bob Avakian wrote in RACIAL OPPRESSION CAN BE ENDED—BUT NOT UNDER THIS SYSTEM:

The continuing terror and murder carried out by the police particularly against Black people (as well as Latinos and Native Americans) is not fundamentally because the police are racist—although, speaking of the police overall, that is certainly true. The fact that the police are racist is itself an expression and a function of the fact that terror and murder against Black people (and other people of color) is required by this system—is necessary in order to maintain the “order” of this all-around oppressive system—and this would be much more difficult to carry out if the police were not racist.

Who is attracted to join the police, who stays with it, what gets reinforced and enforced within the ranks, is a product of the fact that “The role of the police,” as Bob Avakian put it, “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.”

To take one concentrated expression of this, heavily armed, militarized SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams were created in the late 1960s as a counter-revolutionary force. Since the first SWAT “experiment,” a massive raid on the Los Angeles Black Panther headquarters in 1969, cities all over the country have developed SWAT teams. SWAT teams have become notorious for raining sudden terror against people, breaking down doors, guns blazing, like they did when they murdered Amir Locke while he was sleeping on his couch. But ask yourself: Could you maintain a capitalist-imperialist system with extreme economic inequality, and horrendous social oppression against the population it formerly enslaved, if you did not have an armed force to beat people down and prevent them from rising up in rebellion? And could that force do its “job” if it did not have a racist and warlike mentality?

2) Even with sharp differences between liberal and fascist sections of the ruling class over how police violence should be exercised, the entire ruling class is in agreement on the need for a force of organized, institutionalized violence. So when significant numbers of cops get pissed off and stop doing their job, or threaten to resign in protest of restrictions on them, liberal city governments tend to back down. In this case the city manager actually said he agreed with Brackney’s reforms, but he was caught in a bind and had to get rid of her or else risk the whole department falling apart.

The essential point here, as Bob Avakian put it in POLICE AND PRISONS: REFORMIST ILLUSIONS AND THE REVOLUTIONARY SOLUTION, is this:

So long as society is founded on relations that embody exploitation and oppression, and give rise to antagonistic conflicts and violence, including violent crime—so long, in other words, as this system of capitalism-imperialism continues to rule and set the terms for how society functions—there will be a police force that will use violence and terror to maintain the “order,” and enforce the conditions and relations, that conform to the basic nature and requirements of this system. No illusions or wishful thinking can change this reality.

3) Eight years since Ferguson, five years since Charlottesville, two years since the George Floyd uprising, after all the talk of police reform, the “sensitivity” trainings, the endless commissions and review boards, the hundreds of bills in state legislatures, all the Black mayors and police chiefs, what has changed? Police are killing more people than ever!

If you REFUSE to accept the atrocity of 1,000+ people murdered by the police every year, disproportionately Black, Latino, and Native American… If you can see the even more genocidal atrocities that the white supremacist Republican fascists have on deck, and the storm-trooper pigs itching to carry this out… NOW is the time to get serious about what it will actually take to stop this.

As BA put it: “To end police terror you have to put an end to the system that needs police terror.” And that means revolution to overthrow this system of capitalism-imperialism, defeating, disarming, and dismantling its murderous armed forces, and replacing this system with a radically different and much better system.

4) On the basis of a whole new socialist economic and political system, with means of production and societal resources taken out of the hands of capitalist exploiters and used to meet people’s needs and overcome the scars of the old system, there would be a whole new security force, with a completely different job description, reflecting and reinforcing radically different relations between people.

As it says in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by Bob Avakian, defense and security institutions:

… must promote relations of unity and comradeship not only among their own ranks but also between them and the broad masses of people in society at large. Members at all levels of these institutions of public defense and security must never forget—and there must be the continual promotion of education, discussion and struggle throughout these institutions, and among all their members, to instill and deepen the understanding and orientation—that these institutions exist to safeguard the victories of the revolution, and the new socialist state which was brought into being through this revolution, on the basis of the most arduous and self-sacrificing struggle of masses of people; to contribute to the further advance of that revolution; and to safeguard the security and rights of the people and help to create a situation and an atmosphere in which growing ranks of the people will be enabled to, and will, take part in the process of grappling, in an active way, in a lively atmosphere, with the vital matters concerning affairs of state, the governance and direction of society, and the conditions and future of humanity. (From Article 1, Section 2, C, 10)

Compare this to the swaggering, trigger-happy, overseer pigs in Amerikkka, whose job is literally to wage a war on the people and suppress dissent. A police force that cannot be reformed. A system that must be overthrown. Why should we settle for anything less?