For workers and others involved in struggles for justice, this demonstration is an arena to link up with other fighters. They will meet others like themselves from around the country who face similar experiences with the endemic brutality of the cops and are seeking ways to combat it. The action will offer an opportunity to discuss and explain the cause of police violence and put the fight against it into the broader picture.

The function of the police in capitalist society is to protect the property rights and interests of the wealthy ruling class. The problem is not a question of "rogue cops." The problem is cops doing their job. That job is to mete out punishment on the spot in order to keep working people in line--whether terrorizing Black youth on the street or arresting strikers on the picket line.

The slaughter of Amadou Diallo in a barrage of 41 bullets--just to take one example--was not an aberration. The cops are trained like rats in behavioral experiments. The New York cops who killed Diallo explained how they underwent training in the "funhouse," an apartment building filled with gunmen and other false dangers to train them to react to noise and surprises. When asked whether the training included learning to distinguish between guns and harmless objects, one of the cops said: "The only objects they ever pulled on us were firearms. In every incident we were killed." Cops graduate from this training only when they learn the correct reaction to all such cases: shoot to kill.

The killing of Diallo was a result of the city government's "quality of life" campaign. The rulers of this country seek to convince us to accept such cop violence in exchange for "lower crime rates." More "anticrime" measures mean more killings by police, more frame-ups, more incarcerations, and more executions both in the state death chamber and on the street, with workers who are Black or Latino a special target. All these are part of the normal functioning of the cops and the capitalist "justice" system, under Democrats and Republicans alike. Both Albert Gore and George W. Bush have a long record of enforcing that system.

Whenever cops commit violence against anyone, we should demand they be put behind bars--it's the only way to push them back and win justice for those victimized by the gangsters with badges. It was mass protest actions that forced the New York authorities to jail the cops who tortured Haitian immigrant Abner Louima.

To end cop brutalization for good, it will require forging a mass revolutionary movement of working people that takes power out of the hands of the ruling capitalist minority that cops protect, and creating a government of workers and farmers. That is the perspective that supporters of the Socialist Workers candidates for president and vice president, James Harris and Margaret Trowe, are explaining as they campaign among working-class fighters and farmers. Join with them!  
 
 
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