The following article by the League for the Revolutionary party is also available as a printed pamphlet originally issued in 1999. The same pamphlet also contains the short article by Sy Landy What is Proletarian Interracialism?
In a hail of gunfire, police thugs took the life of West African immigrant Amadou Diallo on February 4 [1999] in the Bronx, New York. The death penalty was imposed on him by four members of a racist police force. This atrocity followed the trail of blood left by the murders of Tyisha Miller (Los Angeles) and Donta Dawson (Philadelphia). Nor can we forget the savage beatings suffered by Abner Louima (New York), Jeremiah Mearday (Chicago) and countless others.
The rapid-fire succession of atrocities in city after city has had an unmistakable impact. There is a growing sense that things cannot be allowed to go on like this.
Lately every politician, preacher and labor union hack seems to be decrying the “excessive force” of the police. Indeed, the powers-that-be are quite aware of police brutality. But for them “the problem” is not that police brutality is racist, vicious and unjust. No, for them the problem is that the movement against it could threaten the stability of their system.
The preachers and politicians keep saying it’s just the bad apples that we have to get rid of. But we know that the whole police force is rotten – and the system behind it too. As revolutionists, we believe that some steps can be taken now, but we know that revolution is the only way to end police brutality.
In this pamphlet, we will examine strategy and tactics for the struggle in that light. We will see what is positive (useful) and what is negative (not useful) among the various reform proposals that are being put forward today so that we can build a fighting movement that will not be derailed. We’ll look at what various mainstream politicians are advocating as their “solution” to the growing ferment. We’ll also examine the stances of more radical activists. Many of our examples will be taken from the struggle over the Diallo murder in New York, a prime issue on the national political scene and behind the call for the National Emergency March for Justice Against Police Brutality in Washington, D.C.
In every city, police brutality is on the rise (including cities with Democratic mayors like Chicago, Newark and San Francisco). At the same time, economic crisis is spreading. Full-time jobs are replaced by low-wage part-time jobs; union jobs by workfare. Health care, education and other services are being slashed.
In all of this, Black and Latino workers have been hit the hardest. After all, racism is not just at work when it comes to the deadly behavior of police; it is a tool that keeps people of color down in every walk of life. In fact, there is a profound connection between the rise of racist police brutality and the deepening social and economic crisis in general.
In a society dominated by the few who make their profits by exploiting a vast working class, the rulers must hide the class nature of the system by dividing and conquering the masses. Racism is their key to doing this. As things get worse, more police brutality is needed to keep oppressed people of color in a permanent state of intimidation. It is part of the racist nature of this society.
Obviously racism is used against Blacks and Latinos first and foremost. But it is also used by the capitalist class to keep white workers down: the bosses’ barrage of racist ideas keeps whites from recognizing who their actual enemy is.
In recent years, the mortal crisis of the system has been deepening. “Prosperity” has largely been confined to the top, as the capitalists have made the workers pay for the crisis. Real wages have gone down; job insecurity has gone up. McDonalds jobs and street selling are hardly a real answer. Educational opportunities have worsened. While Black and Latino workers have been hit the hardest, white workers – even those who thought that they had it made – have also suffered. Under such circumstances, the bosses and their government have moved to whip up racism with the lies that Blacks, Latinos and immigrants are “getting the good jobs through affirmative action” and are “living high on welfare off our taxes.” Turning workers against each other is their way of not only forcing down wages but also of stopping united mass action by the exploited and oppressed against the system.
With a worsening economy, the bottom line is that capitalism must forcibly increase exploitation to protect profit rates. Even better-off white workers have to be hit. Yet the ruling class knows that as white workers suffer more under the economic crisis, their discontent with the system will also increase. The last thing the bosses want is a united working-class fightback against capitalist attacks. In order to prevent this they must control the response of white workers as well as the more oppressed. They tell whites that Blacks, Latinos and immigrants are the enemy, not the bosses; that all Blacks and Latinos are dangerous criminals who deserve the treatment they get from the police. They tell whites that since they are superior, they have no reason to join with people of color in common struggle against police brutality and other racist attacks.
The bosses want to prevent an upsurge of Black struggle, and they also want to prevent united mass action against the system by any means necessary. They try to use racism to accomplish both aims.
Nor does the divide-and-conquer ploy end with white vs. Black. This inhuman system always tries to turn Blacks and Latinos against each other. It attempts to turn American-born Blacks against foreign-born Blacks. The capitalist-inspired war of all against all is going to worsen if we don’t put a stop to it – and to those who profit by it.
The system has a lot of tools at its disposal, but it is not all-powerful. It can’t always succeed in its aims. Right now is a case in point. The police murder of Amadou Diallo was taken up not only by African immigrants but by U.S. Blacks as their cause, despite years of anti-immigrant propaganda spouted by Democratic and Republican politicians. The fact that people of color face a common enemy despite different nationalities and ethnicities was made abundantly clear by the shots from a gun that surely discriminates between Black and white – but not between African-American, Haitian, African or Caribbean. As Africans and then American Blacks and Latinos took to the streets repeatedly in large numbers (despite little effort by any big leaders or organizations to mobilize them), whites too started to get the point and lose faith in Mayor Giuliani and his boys in blue. It became clear that there was enough resistance that the Mayor and Police Commissioner could not continue with business as usual.
The struggle in New York over the Diallo murder gained some concrete victories within two months. The most immediate popular demand – for the jailing and prosecution of the cops – is under way. As of this writing, they have been indicted for 2nd-degree murder. There is no question that this was a direct result of the weeks of sustained protests.
Another effect of the mass pressure has been the city’s “reform” of the Street Crimes Unit (SCU), which was responsible for Diallo’s murder. This elite undercover unit was comprised of about 400 officers, almost all white, who lorded about in Black and Latino communities, stopping and searching people without real cause in the supposed search for illegal weapons. Their thuggery had been stepped up in 1998 as part of Mayor Giuliani’s racist “quality of life” campaign, based on the harassment of poor people, especially youth, for minor offenses like fare-beating, riding a bike without a bell, street selling without a license and sleeping in the park.
After the outcry over Diallo’s murder, exposés in New York papers highlighted the obvious bias and unconstitutionality of the SCU, which was already well known in the communities in which it had operated so invasively. (At least 80 percent of its searches yielded no weapon, and about half of the arrests were being thrown out of court.) To calm the waters, a Black police captain, Robert Wheeler 3rd, was promoted to second in command of the SCU in late March. Regarding the predominance of whites in the unit, Wheeler commented:
In general, I’ve heard Blacks and Hispanics tend to stay away from plainclothes work because of the possibility of friendly fire. If you move from place to place in plain clothes, and end up in a precinct where nobody knows you, there’s some danger. (New York Daily News, March 21 [1999].)
Thus the police authorities admit that even Black and Latino cops are not safe from cop predators. And the danger is all the greater for unarmed Black and Latino youth.
In addition, 50 Black officers were shipped into the unit and a drive to recruit more Blacks to the SCU was begun. And the city announced that the SCU was being converted overnight from a plainclothes to a uniformed unit – with a pay hike, a reward for pumping 41 bullets into Amadou Diallo! Nevertheless, mass pressure has pretty much derailed the SCU for now. Everyone knows that the NYPD has been forced to retreat. Police Commissioner Howard Safir bemoaned that “Street crime arrests are down 62 percent since the concentration on the Diallo case.” But while Safir claimed this was of grave concern to the population because it meant more criminals on the loose, a representative of the Black police organization, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement, explained:
We’ve been telling the Commissioner for years that street crimes has been just searching people at will, all in minority neighborhoods. The reason the arrests are going down is that all of a sudden, they have to play by the same rules as everyone else. (New York Times, March 29.)
There are also reports that said the infamous 48-hour rule, by which cops are conveniently protected from departmental questioning after an “incident,” will also be eliminated when the police “union” contract expires soon.
Thus shows that when working people unite, victories can be won. But we still have far to go. When it comes to the police, a life and death matter, we must take serious stock of where to go from here.
The very existence of modern capitalism depends on the protection provided to the system by its armed bodies of men, its police and army. Without these forces, the system of minority rule, where a small group of wealthy capitalists own the means of production and force the masses at home and abroad to toil for them in order to survive, would be overthrown pretty fast.
People of color in the U.S. experience the local police as an occupying force. At the memorial service for Amadou Diallo at the Islamic Center in Manhattan a week after his murder, Mayor Giuliani was received as an enemy. One protestor put it this way: “It’s like Netanyahu [Israel’s Prime Minister] going to the wake of a Palestinian killed by Israeli soldiers.” (New York Post, Feb. 13 [1999].)
Many people note that the police are separate from the masses; in this racist society the most obvious difference is often between the race of the officer and the race or nationality of his victim. In actuality the main difference is one of class. The cops, although many come from working-class backgrounds, function as a separate body of armed men, agents of the bourgeoisie, who enforce capitalist law and order against the will of the majority of the population, the workers and oppressed, in order to maintain the stability of that system.
In relatively peaceful times, as in the U.S. today, the essential role of the police is not so obvious. People know that the cops exist to enforce the laws protecting private property, but they also accept that police are supposed to protect the citizenry from harm. But protection of working people is only an incidental function of the police, not their main one.
The class nature of the police becomes more evident during times of great protests and strikes, when the capitalist economy is endangered by working-class action. In the turbulent strikes of the 30’s and 60’s, white workers were beat down and shot by police in this country as well as Blacks. When large labor struggles break out in the future, as they have in the past, this essential role of the police will also become more obvious once again. In fact, when masses of workers go into motion against the interests of the ruling class – in the U.S. or anywhere in the world – the police always defend the bosses. They arrest, they beat and they shoot at will. In times of upsurge the cops show their true colors: their main task is protecting the system from harm, not protecting the working and oppressed masses.
Likewise when the U.S. military bombs or invades a weaker nation, whether it be Somalia or Haiti, Iraq or Serbia. It may claim its role is humanitarian, but the U.S. is always there to protect world capitalism and assert its imperialist domination.
Capitalist politicians, Democratic as well as Republican, can never tell the whole truth about the police. If they did they would be exposing the system they support. Understanding the true nature of the police can only lead exploited and oppressed people to come to revolutionary conclusions. So when struggles against the police break out, the politicians – Democrats especially – flounder around and re-shuffle a shopworn list of “reforms,” hoping that will forestall a more profound resistance from emerging.
Right now the movement is led by politicians like as the former New York mayoral candidate Reverend Al Sharpton and the former Presidential candidate Reverend Jesse Jackson. No matter how radical or militant their rhetoric may sound at times, they peddle the illusion that the cops can be reformed.
One old demand that is being revived now is the call for a civilian review board (CRB). This is the first demand of a coalition of Black, Latino, labor and “progressive” leaders that formed in New York in the wake of the Diallo murder (see below). True enough, the cops don’t like any kind of interference in their harassment, so they oppose review boards even though they are a toothless operation at best. The debate is usually over whether a CRB will operate as part of the police department or be “independent.” Those that are “independent” invariably find that they can not even gather basic information, because of lack of cooperation from the police. They can’t get funding and are sabotaged in every possible way. But even under the best-case scenario, such boards are window-dressing: they consist mainly of appointed or (rarely) elected bourgeois politicians and business representatives; they are allowed to review complaints, and then their suggestions are virtually always ignored.
A study put out by Human Rights Watch did not find any civilian review boards successful. Most of them were considered extremely weak in practice, no matter what their mandate was. In only rare cases does a Review Board have subpoena power and even then it is invariably defeated by the police and other sections of the government. One of the better examples, the Minneapolis Civilian Police Review Authority (CRA) still produced a negligible result. As Human Rights Watch noted:
In fact, disciplinary action by the police chief following an allegation of excessive force submitted in a signed CRA complaint is rare ... it would appear that few complaints result in disciplinary action. (Shielded From Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States, Human Rights Watch, 1998.)
The ineffectiveness of civilian review boards is symptomatic of the fact that capitalism will not allow any review board to be independent of the system, which would mean it would have its own actual power to actually punish cops. The only forces which have the power to decide and enforce punishment are the courts, which are firmly tied to the capitalist state which in turn depends on the police.
Because the police serve the system, the system will never satisfactorily punish its own police. Local prosecution anywhere of police officers for excessive use of force is extremely rare. In New York, only three cops have been convicted for on-duty killings since 1977. Even if Diallo’s murderers are eventually convicted, there is little chance that the penalties will fit the crimes. For example, when cops can opt for a judicial decision without a jury trial, their chances of conviction are tiny. This how Officer Frank Livoti got off for the chokehold death of Anthony Baez in the Bronx.
Another example: on July 4, 1996, Nathaniel Gaines, Jr., a Black man, was shot in the back and killed by Officer Colecchia, a white cop, on a Bronx subway platform – after Gaines had already been frisked and Colecchia knew he carried no weapons. Colecchia was indicted on charges of 1st-degree manslaughter and immediately suspended – even Giuliani didn’t come to his defense. But in 1997 he was convicted only of 2nd-degree manslaughter and sentenced to less than five years in prison. Now even this paltry sentence is under appeal – and this is one of the few successful cases of prosecution in New York.
In Chicago, only a handful of brutality cases have been prosecuted against cops in the past two decades. The same is true in all other major cities. (See Shielded From Justice, cited above.)
A more popular demand – in fact one now endorsed even by racist Mayor Giuliani – is for the recruitment of more Black and Latino cops. Representatives from 100 Black Officers In Law Enforcement, along with both Black and white politicians, advocate active recruitment of young Blacks and Latinos into the police force.
It is certainly true that the pervasive racism of the police can be restricted by the presence of officers of color in certain specific and individual incidents. But in general, workers and oppressed people must be absolutely clear about the essential nature of the cops and not be fooled by their skin color. The police – white, Black and Latino – serve the capitalists, and as long as they are doing their job, they are the enemy of the workers and oppressed. Indeed, a number of Black cops have lost their lives or suffered major threats as a result of the racism of their “fellow” white officers. But that does not prevent them from acting like cops when their police duty calls.
Puerto Rican police had no trouble in following orders from their government and beating Puerto Rican strikers viciously during the strike movement in Puerto Rico last year. Black South African police in post-apartheid South Africa did likewise during the mass strikes of South African Black workers. Is it really so different here? Ask Black and Latino residents of Newark, Detroit or other cities with large percentages of Black cops. Do residency laws help? Ask folks in Philadelphia or Washington D.C., where residency requirements already exist. (A Washington Post study of police shootings in 1998 concluded that Washington had one of the highest rates of gun discharges by cops, although it has a majority Black police forces patrolling a majority Black city.)
Clearly the notion that police of the same color or neighborhood are automatically more sensitive or less brutal is a dangerous myth. Some Black cops go out of their way to be vicious in order to enter the blue brotherhood. Many housing project residents in New York can testify about the dangers of Black and Latino cops: so can many Caribbean people in Crown Heights (Brooklyn, New York) who have been abused by prejudiced Black and Latino cops as well as white.
Cops are at the forefront of the racist capitalist system’s attempt to subjugate oppressed people and protect the private property system. Even the “honest” cop who is not particularly corrupt or racist – indeed a rarity – has to pledge to carry out laws and policies that are racist, unjust and suppressive when they sign on. And that is the main point. It is not a question of the individual character of the officer (although the police force does tend to attract the most reactionary elements). The reason that cops are cops, regardless of skin color, is because of their function, because of the system they serve and the laws and policies they carry out – which are racist and anti-working class and poor.
This outrageous situation has led to the popularity of the demand for federal prosecution of criminal cops. Federal prosecution, for example, led to the conviction of Officer Livoti after a Bronx judge had released him.
The demand for federal prosecution should be supported – although no one should have illusions about the chances for victory. The fact is that the federal record of prosecution is only marginally better than the local record. In addition to the delays involved in federal prosecution, as with local prosecution the punishments hardly ever fit the crimes. Of the 22 cases considered by federal prosecutors for New York City in 1996, only five were prosecuted. In the previous three years, ninety-four cases were considered, with nineteen leading to prosecutions. In Chicago, of the eighteen cases considered by federal prosecutors, none were prosecuted. In the three prior years 79 cases were considered and only six were prosecuted. It doesn’t get much better anywhere else. (Again see Shielded from Justice for more details.)
Human Rights Watch summed it up this way:
Even in the rare cases in which police officers and others are convicted on federal criminal civil rights charges, they spend little or no time incarcerated. In 1994 and 1995, twenty-five defendants, out of ninety-six convicted, were sentenced to three months or less in prison (including serving no time at all.) Forty-eight, or half, were sentenced to twelve months or less.
If one needs further proof of the federal government’s disinclination to punish police, consider this. The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department prosecutes defendants for hate crimes, abortion clinic terror, church arson and so forth; in these areas, its conviction, rate is nearly 100 percent. Yet when it prosecutes police for official misconduct, including brutality, its success rate is far less: 78 percent in 1994-95 and 64 percent in 1996. Police misconduct cases are prosecuted with the lowest success rate of all civil rights offense cases – and civil rights cases are prosecuted less than any other offense prosecuted by the Justice Department to begin with.
One of the few cases where the federal government stepped in with any positive results was with the case of Rodney King. After a local jury exonerated the cops – who had been caught on videotape mercilessly beating King in 1991 – the city of Los Angeles broke out in riots, which were echoed with significant protests in other cities. In April 1993, two of the cops were convicted – but only for using “excessive force.” They got thirty months imprisonment, and the other two cops were completely let off. Even this small victory only happened after massive rioting.
Prosecutions of individual criminal cops are necessary but insufficient. Thus in the Diallo case, reformists from Al Sharpton to NAACP head Kweisi Mfume to Ron Daniels of the Center for Constitutional Rights have called for various federal investigations, hearings, studies and legislation regarding the NYPD and the national epidemic of police brutality. This is an attempt to pretend they have an answer to the problem – in the face of a mass movement which wants big answers. But such federal investigations, hearings etc. have not resulted in one single victory against police brutality. Believing that we can rely on the federal government to fight the racism and brutality experienced in every city is the biggest myth of all.
Governmental power in this country is divided between the federal, the state and the local levels, but this division of power is nothing more than a method of organization for capitalist rule. When working-class people protest, the capitalist strategy is to pass the buck. The city government tells you it lacks funding from the state, the state tells you it lacks funding from the federal, and the federal tells you that it simply didn’t know what the state or the local government was doing, or somehow it couldn’t control it. The laws that the police carry out anywhere are the laws that defend and preserve capitalism and private property. The funding they get comes from the federal budget as well as the state and local budgets. It all works together for one purpose. The racism that pervades city police forces is hardly absent at the federal level. (See below for a review of what the federal government did during the civil rights struggle of the 1960’s.)
The fact is there have been countless federal commissions – with their investigations, hearings and studies of police brutality – in this century, and the results are always the same. The Harlem Riot Commission Report of 1935 discovered this about the police:
The police of Harlem show too little regard for human rights and constantly violate their fundamental rights as citizens. ... The insecurity of the individual in Harlem against police aggression is one of the most potent causes for the existing hostility to authority. ... It is clearly the responsibility of the police to act in such a way as to win the confidence of the citizens of Harlem and to prove themselves the guardians of the rights and safety of the community rather than its enemies and oppressors.
Sound familiar? Studies in the ’60’s proved that little had changed. The 1961 Report on Justice by the United States Civil Rights Commission concluded that “Police brutality ... is a serious problem in the United States.” In 1967, the Kerner Commission reported that police violence was out of control. Then there was the St. Clair Commission, the Mollen Commission, the Christopher Commission, and so forth. Same recommendations for more “sensitivity,” more “training” and more oversight. In fact federal hearings are going on in New York right now, as part of an investigation into the torture of Abner Louima in the 70th precinct in Brooklyn last year. At a hearing at Medgar Evers College in late March, Louima’s cousin Samuel Nicholas pointed out:
We have had task forces and studies, and the problem still exists. We don’t need another study, we need answers, we want a solution.
We won’t get a solution through more government investigations.
In the wake of the Los Angeles riot in 1992, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was passed. It included a statute under which the Justice Department could bring civil action against a police department engaging in a “pattern or practice” of misconduct, in order to direct that particular department to end abusive practices. In two cities, Pittsburgh PA and Steubenville OH, the federal government then actually made deals with the police departments under such “pattern or practice” provisions. Both cities agreed to improve training, do better tracking of the use of force by officers and other measures.
In Pittsburgh the federal investigation had followed an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit filed against the police in 1996, in the aftermath of the uproar over the suffocation murder of Jonny Gammage in 1995. (Gammage, a cousin of former Pittsburgh Steelers player Ray Seals, was “driving while Black” at the wheel of a Jaguar in a white suburb. He was “apprehended” and killed.) After the federal investigation led to the consent decree agreement for reforms, everyone claimed things were better. But on December 21, 1998 this claim was publicly shattered. Police officer Jeff Cooperstein shot and killed Deron Grimmit, an unarmed Black parolee who was fleeing police, apparently fearful of what they would do to him in the course of their “routine” traffic stop. Likewise, it was only a few years after the post-Rodney King Christopher Commission and the supposed reform of the LAPD that Tyisha Miller got blown away for sleeping in a locked car.
The demand for federal investigation and even federal takeover of local police is the last best hope of local politicians who are trying to restore faith in the system. This notion of federal salvation is heavily tied to attempts to rev up support for the Democratic Party. Thus at the Wall Street rally in New York on March 3, Sharpton called on Bill (and Hillary) Clinton to step in: “It is time for you to act like JFK did and help us deal with this outrageous situation.”
But the truth is that in the 1960’s a very reluctant White House under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson took only minimal steps after being threatened with massive marches and the huge revolts that swept the nation’s ghettoes. The Kennedy administration was responsible for a number of executive actions and initiatives in the area of voting legislation, as well as the Voting Rights Bill of 1963, which were helpful to the civil rights movement. These responses were the least it could do in response to a mass movement that always threatened to become more radical. But the Kennedy administration was also active in endorsing the spying functions of the FBI, an activity that was only to grow under the Johnson administration. No wonder that Sharpton, an admitted FBI fink himself, paints a pretty picture of such dirty deeds.
Indeed, much of federal intervention into the civil rights struggle, and later more radical developments of Black struggle, was absolutely insidious and earned the just hatred of young Black and white activists against the federal government in general and the FBI, the federal police, in particular. A few examples will suffice here. (For more, read Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972, by Kenneth O’Reilly.)
Jack Newfield, now a writer for the New York Post, recalled his experience in the civil rights movement this way:
As civil rights activists in 1963 we liked Kennedy as little as the Southern Governors did. We saw him recommend Harold Cox, James Eastland’s college roommate, to be a judge in the Fifth District Court, where he was to call Negro defendants “chimpanzees” from the bench. ... We saw Negroes trying to register to vote in Greenwood, Mississippi, urinated upon by a white farmer, while lawyers from the Justice Department calmly took notes destined to be filed and forgotten. We agreed with James Baldwin, who pronounced Kennedy, after their stormy confrontation, insensitive and unresponsive to the Negro’s torment.
The author of Racial Matters points out that the definitive attitude of the federal government was shown by “Robert Kennedy’s decision, and the FBI’s enthusiastic response, to prosecute a group of civil rights activists while continuing to uphold the Bureau’s noninterventionist policy with regard to the people terrorizing those activists.”
About the federal government’s slow and reticent response on issues of Southern racism, historian Howard Zinn summed up:
The simple and harsh fact ... is that the federal government abdicated its responsibility in the Black Belt. The Negro citizens of that area were left to the local police.
Black political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal knows this history. In a recent article, “The Folly of Calling The FBI,” Abu-Jamal said this about the history of federal intervention into the Black struggle:
When Black folks are beaten down by cops all around the United States, and when they are shot down in their cars as in the cases of Dontae Dawson of Philadelphia, or Malice Green of Detroit, or the beautiful young sister (Tyisha Miller) who was shot over 15 times in her car in Riverside, California recently ..., one of the first things that many Black leaders do, is to announce that they are asking for the FBI to come in to “solve” the case.
... Such a call sounds strange when one considers that the FBI played a significant and an openly dangerous role in the history of African-American struggles for freedom in America, and they were deadly enemies of such leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Marcus M. Garvey, and of such groups as the Black Panther Party, RAM, SNCC, the Republic of New Afrika, and the like. In truth, the history of the FBI shows that they have waged a secret war against Black America, and frankly, it seems kind of stupid to look to them for relief from other state forces who are waging a part of their long white supremacist war against Black folks.
The politicians who call for federal intervention are not stupid. Since they defend the capitalist system, they have no alternative except for calling on the federal forces to punish the local forces –of the same capitalist state. Nor are the ranks of demonstrators stupid. In fact people are going to demand prosecution, and if they can’t get it from the local NYPD, then they’ll demand it from the federal government. But an independent working-class alternative must be built because dependency and illusions regarding any wing of the bourgeois state – and certainly the FBI! – is a deathtrap for any movement.
Republican Mayor Giuliani of New York has been leading the war on Blacks, Latinos and immigrants in order to make the city safe for profits. But Giuliani and the Republicans don’t operate alone. In fact Giuliani’s “quality of life” campaign, which has encouraged police to harass people of color from street vendors to taxi drivers, is just a special spin on the barrage of “get tough on crime” policies that have come from Washington.
The Democratic president, Bill Clinton, has taken the lead in putting thousands more cops on the streets and pushing “anti-crime” bills which really serve to produce more police violence against Blacks and Latinos and stiffer sentences for even minor crimes. His “achievements” include legislation dictating life imprisonment for third felony offenses (“three strikes and you’re out”), immediate deportation of immigrants with any criminal record, and harsher sentences for young offenders. He has been responsible for record numbers of executions. Despite his rhetorical friendliness of Blacks, the totality of his policies – from the slashing of welfare to the bombing of Iraq – have exacerbated racism and brutality.
On March 13, President Clinton used his weekly radio address to address the question of police abuse. He stated:
Our nation’s police officers every day put their lives on the line for the rest of us. I have done my best to support them. But I have been deeply disturbed by recent allegations of serious police misconduct and continued reports of racial profiling that have shaken some communities’ faith in the police who are there to protect them.
He proceed to outline five steps in what he called the “2lst Century Policing Initiative” which he promised to send to Congress. The proposal would include better training and education, more hiring of minorities, more money for prosecution of “bad officers”, 50,000 more cops on the street, and a nationwide program to improve community-police relations.
While Black leaders from Sharpton to Hugh Price (of the National Urban League) and NAACP President Kweisi Mfume tried to put a positive spin on Clinton’s speech, there really wasn’t anything new or useful in it. In fact, according to The Final Call (March 30) even Ron Hampton, executive director of the National Black Police Association, rebuffed the White House’s new initiatives as “a joke.”
When you talk integrity, ethics training, citizens’ police academies and hiring more minority police officers, all of them put together are not going to do anything. ... They’ve been teaching police ethics and integrity training for some time now.
As well, federal investigations under Clinton’s leadership have led to nothing. The economic and social situation for Blacks since he became president in 1992 is abysmal. This is no accident. In the ’60’s, the Democratic Party of Johnson and Kennedy could afford to give crumbs in response to the riots and strikes. But under today’s economic crisis, the Democrat’s policy is necessarily one of austerity and cutbacks – and Blacks, as always under American capitalism, are set up to get hit worst.
We contend that the key question facing the movement is whether or not to continue relying on the Democratic Party. Just as it is critical to understand the role of police in society in order to fight them, it is necessary to understand the essential role of the Democratic Party in this system – in order to learn why an alternative party must be built.
Blacks first turned to the Democratic Party in big numbers in the late 1920’s as they emigrated from South to North. When the depression of the 30’s hit, the working class, including Blacks, responded to mass unemployment and huge cuts with general strikes, sitdowns, factory take-overs and other mass action. At that point the Democratic Party, led by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was forced to create beneficial government programs – in order to stabilize the threatening situation of an aroused working class that was becoming more and more revolutionary in its views and acts. Social Security and unemployment insurance came into being as part of this strategy of stabilization.
In the 1960’s, Blacks became the vanguard of struggle in this country. The change from the ’30’s was that Blacks had by then become a core part of the industrial working class as well as a key political and social factor in every major urban center. So this time the Democrat politicians had to dole out more concessions in response to Black militancy as well as working-class and youth unrest in general. A whole new host of programs (including Medicare) came into being, and the Democratic Party seduced and produced a whole layer of Black middle-class politicians who could be relied on to keep things under control so that there would be no more riots. The myth of the Democratic Party as the “friend” of Blacks and Labor was played up to the hilt.
After 12 years of Republican administrations, the Democrats won the White House again in 1992 in response to the Los Angeles riot. The ruling capitalists feared that Republican President George Bush was so insensitive to the plight of Blacks (not unlike Mayor Giuliani) that he would inspire further resistance. So they moved to support Clinton. That way they got a President who they hoped could keep Blacks in line by dappling the political structure with a few more Black faces and kind words, while still carrying out a deadly program of cutbacks that would knock thousands of families off welfare, put thousands of immigrant workers in detention centers, and get more Black and Latino youth beat up and shoved into jail by racist cops.
The Democratic Party is the capitalist institution whose purpose historically has been to squash mass movements by buying off leading elements and thereby carving out a pro-capitalist middle-class leadership layer within the struggle to push passive electoralism and reliance on the system. The Democrats operate by the same divide-and-conquer method that typifies capitalism as a whole – instead of treating all workers as one class of people, which in fact we are, it grants benefits to different “constituencies” – ethnic or racial groups, women, gays, or whoever – so as to encourage fights between different oppressed and exploited groups over who will get the bigger slice. (For more analysis, see our pamphlet: The Democratic Party: Graveyard of Black Struggles.)
It is thus no accident that voter registration and appeals to the Clintons are key elements of the Democratic Party strategy on police brutality today. But since Clinton and the Democrats offer so little, it is getting harder for minority politicians to convince folks to stay in line with them.
The role of the Democratic Party is to contain and control the anger of the masses over police brutality. The more effective politicians do this by reflecting the feelings of the masses. In the past period, no local figure has been more successful at this than the Reverend Al Sharpton, in large part because of his consistency in identifying himself with the burning issue of police brutality – as well as the fact that the alternatives to him that people know about are so pathetic. (For example, the Reverend Calvin Butts, another figure in the current Diallo campaign, compromised his reputation by backing the pro-death penalty Republican Governor Pataki.) Congressman Charles Rangel is another sellout who, in the wake of the Diallo shooting, publicly chimed in with the NYPD to protest a timely front cover New Yorker cartoon depicting cops taking practice shots at citizens. Nevertheless, all these folks joined together in the past month to carry out a prolonged campaign of civil disobedience under Sharpton’s lead.
Sharpton is credited by many for keeping the pressure on in the seven weeks since the Diallo murder, but his strategy comes at a cost. He has done everything possible to corral the movement and make it as limited and passive as possible. In the wake of the Abner Louima torture case in 1997, ten thousand people marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall in a display of militancy and solidarity. Sharpton, at that time running for the Democratic Mayoral nomination, cut the movement off by speechifying for voter registration and basically telling everyone to go home. He put forward no perspective for continuing the struggle.
Today, with the Louima case still fresh in people’s minds, he couldn’t pull off the same trick twice. But he has no interest in building a militant mass movement, which might get out of hand. Thus it was no accident that he launched a civil disobedience campaign oriented to politicians, movie stars and other luminaries rather than attracting the involvement and leadership of the working people themselves. As one journalist observed:
Although sit-ins are a form of civil disobedience, the manner in which the Diallo protests are conducted – the would-be arrestees are waved over to a pre-determined spot by NYPD brass and the line up to be handcuffed – is really an exercise in civil obedience. The protestors even provide the cops with a list of that day’s arrestees, the better to speed the booking process.
The staged arrest-ins showed their class bias. The experience of middle-class folks in three-piece suits shaking hands with polite cops and getting voluntarily booked for several hours (a few were held overnight) does not compare with that of working people when they are thrown in jail – especially Black and Latino youth, who inevitably get roughed up or worse. Civil disobedience is by nature a method alien to workers and oppressed people who know that getting arrested and dealing with cops is serious business. It was particularly repugnant that Sharpton chose this strategy in the light of the fact that immigrants, especially under Clinton’s law, can’t afford to get arrested even once for anything without facing deportation! Indeed, so pro-establishment and pro-Democratic Party was the campaign that even the notoriously racist former mayor Ed Koch volunteered to get arrested. And several ex-cops, bemoaning “what has happened to the Police Department,” joined the civil disobedience on the last day.
In leading his parade of celebrities, Sharpton invoked the history of the civil rights movement. But this was a false comparison and a gross insult. Despite his reformist politics, Martin Luther King and his followers risked life and limb in fighting to overturn discriminatory laws thorough sitdowns and peaceful marches. Their passive strategy couldn’t win much, despite the valiant efforts of many; the period of riots and general militancy and radicalization that followed was able to win much more.
For those who see through the Democratic Party strategy of passive electoralism and civil disobedience, there are a number of political forces which claim to have more radical or left-wing answers. Among them is the Workers World Party, which has been touting a community control solution to the nightmare of police terror. One article in their press quoted a press statement which said in part, “Ultimately, the community must have control of the police and the community must mobilize to make sure that the killer police are disarmed.” The Workers World article (Feb. 18) added:
Community control of the police is not a new concept. During the 1960s at the height of the Black liberation struggle, the Black Panther Party was in the forefront of organizing for control of the police, carrying the Constitution in one hand and a gun for self-defense in the other. ... Community control of the cops means just that. The community has the right to determine who will make its streets safe. The community has the right to organize its own safety patrols block by block without any kind of outside interference. The community has the right to disarm the police of their sophisticated weapons of terror.
This left-sounding proposal has not worked out in practice for several reasons. The Panthers did propose community control as a solution to capitalism’s reign of terror against Blacks. The problem was that the Panthers saw racism as an external force coming from the outside and therefore argued that Blacks could free themselves by seizing control of their own communities. But Blacks who live in Black communities nevertheless depend on the factories, banks and businesses, as well as government agencies, for their employment and other factors of survival and existence. If all Blacks control is their own community, they hold no real power and in fact can be crushed by the forces of the government, its cops and its troops, if they get out of line.
The Panthers were eventually destroyed, in large part by FBI covert operations against them. But by their end they had also forsaken a lot of their revolutionary and militant thrust in favor of alliances with liberal Democrats and charity activities like breakfast programs – instead of mass revolutionary organization to show the necessity of confronting capitalism’s state power.
The legacy of community control turned into the idea of putting local Black Democratic politicians in office to administer the ghettoes, instead of whites. But as the economy crumbled, Black mayors, police chiefs and other officials proliferated, put into position by the ruling class to do what whites couldn’t get away with in Black communities and cities with large Black populations. Black faces administered the steady closing down of opportunities and programs. It became more and more obvious that having Black capitalist politicians run things didn’t benefit the masses of Blacks.
There are important aspects to the history of the Black Panthers and the “community control” experience that should not be dismissed. The Panthers began by making a revolutionary attempt to carry on Malcolm X’s legacy, in particular in favor of armed self-defense for Blacks. Their early demands to end police terror through self-defense attracted thousands to their banner in the 1960’s. The armed and uniformed Panthers rightfully stirred pride and feelings of militancy in Black people, and still do today. They followed cop patrols around to observe misconduct. They instilled a sense of purpose in many ghetto dwellers, actually reducing crime and drugs in their neighborhoods for a time.
Their ultimate failing was in based in part on an overemphasis on guns without a full revolutionary program. They focused only on the immediate community, and within that community they focused on mobilizing what they called the “lumpen proletariat.” They largely ignored industrial workers who lived in the community but who had the power to engage in struggle in the factories and workplaces as well as in the neighborhood. Guns without a strategy for taking on the capitalist state and the central capitalist economy proved not enough.
There are other forces today, particularly among Black nationalists who emphasize militant armed self-defense, in apparent counterposition to the more conciliatory approach of the Sharpton & Co.. Outside the February 12 memorial for Diallo, for example, Khallid Muhammad and other members of his New Black Panther Party urged “eye for an eye” vengeance against the murderous police officers. Muhammad, a former aide to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, urged Blacks to arm themselves. “This is a time for the masses to rise up in self-defense,” he said. “It is time to speak the language of those whose language is killing, maiming, lynching and genocide. This is a time of war and a time of peace, a time to heal and a time to kill. There’s medicine in the murder, and there’s healing in killing.”
It is absolutely true that the arming of Blacks for self-defense against police attack is a critical task. But radical rhetoric and a call to arms alone give no direction to the movement and could be a recipe for disaster. Unlike the original Black Panthers, Khallid Muhammad has no revolutionary impetus. The program of his Million Youth March in Harlem last year had a vague call for jobs while emphasizing Black business development, and his podium featured Democrats and voter registration calls without any opposition. Armed self-defense must be undertaken by working-class people in a serious way; the posturing of pro-capitalist types like Khallid Muhammad should be rejected as just that.
Marxist revolutionaries advocate armed self-defense against police attacks as part of an entire revolutionary program and strategy. Like Malcolm, we believe that the right of Blacks and others under attack by the racist capitalist state to defend themselves is unquestionable in principle and necessary in reality. Toward this end, the League for the Revolutionary Party has always raised the need for defense guards against racist and anti-working class attacks. We say that in the near future it will be possible to call for such guards in specific situations, which in turn can represent the embryos of a future workers’ militia. Black struggles in the past showed the effectiveness of short-term armed defense guards like the southern Deacons for Defense and Robert F. Williams’ armed defense units in Monroe, North Carolina. All these examples should be studied and learned from. (See our pamphlet Armed Self-Defense and the Revolutionary Program.)
But the history of struggle has also shown that successful armed self-defense must be organized on a mass basis as part of a conscious political struggle. When working people start arming themselves and learning to defend themselves. they will not only be taking on cops who are armed and organized in large numbers. They will also be dealing with a sophisticated imperialist world power with major political parties that have more than a century of experience in selling out mass struggles.
Blacks, Latinos and immigrants shouldn’t wait for white workers to join the struggle to start organizing to defend themselves. No, we advocate the development of Black armed self-defense today. We believe that as people of color move forward in militant struggle, white workers will also become educated and won over. But guns alone aren’t the answer. A revolutionary strategy based on the need for a powerful working-class unity and a politically sophisticated workers’ revolutionary party must be developed before the capitalist state can be taken on and defeated thoroughly.
In this pamphlet we have argued that police brutality can not be solved by reforming police departments. We have also argued that “left” Democrats, nationalists and even pseudo-socialists are not providing real answers. Yet this analysis can prove demoralizing to those who want to fight police brutality. If the working class is not convinced that revolution is necessary, does that mean there is no way of fighting back today? The truth is that this is far from the case because people, all of us, learn and raise our political consciousness through the course of struggle. And those struggles can be successfully built and developed today. Cops can be forced to retreat. Framed-up prisoners on death row can be freed. A mass movement against police brutality can be built. The question is, how can revolutionary-minded workers and youth take the lead in building a strong and successful movement against police brutality without feeding illusions that there is a reform answer?
Mass action is the key. There are key concrete steps that revolutionary-minded people should band together and do to start turning this situation around. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people turn out for protests – but there should be hundreds of thousands.
As part of the drive to maximize our forces, we must take the issue of fighting racist police brutality into the working class’s most powerful organizations, the unions. Union leaders have barely lifted a finger to mobilize the ranks of workers in the struggle against police brutality. In many cities, unions represent large numbers of Blacks and Latinos – both U.S.-born and immigrant – who are the main victims of police brutality. Yet unions tend to follow policies that cater to the better-off white workers in the unions. In New York, the recent uproar over the Diallo murder has forced the union leaders to start moving, which means that more pressure can be successfully brought to bear on them.
Of course, like the Democratic politicians, the union leaders have moved in order to corral and limit the movement. Following the staged arrests of labor figures like President Dennis Rivera of 1199, he and other labor leaders joined a coalition with several Congressmen and local politicians to produce a ten-point program, demanding the usual reforms like civilian review boards, more Black and Latino cops and a special prosecutor for police brutality and corruption in New York. And whereas Giuliani and his Police Commissioner had offered the demoralized SCU a raise in pay, this “progressive” coalition called for higher pay and benefits for all cops! Even the AFL-CIO, long paralyzed over the decades of attacks on New York workers, issued a statement pointing out that it owed it to its large constituency of Black and Latino workers to take a stand against police brutality. Given these openings, tremendous pressure should be exerted now to force the unions to take serious action against police brutality, and to drop all demands that placate the repressive police. When Black, Latino and anti-racist white workers take the lead, more white workers will wake up and follow.
We have to start advocating, in the unions as well as the community organizations, the need not only for rallies but for a one-day general strike to be called immediately when the next atrocity occurs. Politicians like Sharpton say: “No Justice, No Peace.” But this can mean little more than noise, which eventually dies down. Even riots like in Los Angeles were unable to achieve lasting gains because they didn’t target the ruling class in an organized way. We say “No Justice, No Peace, No Profits.” When there is a cop atrocity like what happened to Amadou Diallo, the city should be shut down! A general strike, based on the power of workers to shut down the economy, is counterposed to the passive civil disobedience and consumer boycotts perennially called by reformist leaders and ignored by the ruling class.
Imagine what could have happened if, instead of Rev. Sharpton using the big Wall Street rally last month to launch his middle-class oriented civil disobedience effort, militant contingents of workers had demanded strike action against the capitalists who back the police.
As this pamphlet has argued, the cops cannot be reformed. But a fighting mass movement can force the government to rein in their hired thugs; it can point the way to the full struggle that is necessary. For years the League for the Revolutionary Party has propagandized for a general strike against the capitalist attacks. Police brutality does not exist in a vacuum – it is inseparable from the whole range of attacks while the capitalist class is launching against us. In the 1960’s, riots spread from city to city, mainly sparked by incidents of police brutality. But the ghetto explosions hardly limited themselves to one issue, once started. No, demands for decent jobs, health care and education came out of those struggles too. We are open about the fact that today our aim in any general strike is also to spread it into a more widespread struggle whereby the working class will begin to recognize its own power, and more and more working people and youth will become convinced of the need for revolution. Fighting for such mass action instead of pro-capitalist electoralism is a key element in a revolutionary strategy.
Black and Latino workers and youth must take the lead in carrying out such a strategy. More white workers must learn that fighting racism is an integral part of any successful fight against the bosses’ attacks and the only way that working-class unity can be forged.
The working class must overthrow the capitalist state, which couldn’t exist for a day without its police and armies. The capitalist state must be replaced with a workers’ state which would have its own armed power, based on the masses of working people rather on an elite separate force hired by an exploiter class. The workers’ armed power would serve to protect the working class for a change; it would actually prevent crime as well as stop racist and anti-social acts.
Capitalism has proved itself to be a diseased system, not worthy to rule the planet. The world economy’s productive forces have reached the point where all forms of want can be eliminated. Humanity can build a socialist society of abundance and peace. A socialist revolution would put the exploited and oppressed masses on top, running society in their interests, planning the economy to produce for their needs and not for profits.
None of this can happen if a revolutionary working class party is not built. Such a party must make itself a tribune of all oppressed people to prove that it is fit to lead. We urge revolutionary-minded workers and youth to join with us in carrying out this urgent task.