The five New York cops who fired a hail of 50 bullets that killed Sean Bell and seriously wounded Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield in Jamaica, New York, should immediately be prosecuted and jailed for their criminal actions. A big turnout for the December 6 rally in Manhattan and other such public actions can help win this demand for justice.

The big-business media and capitalist politicians are working overtime to head off any mobilizations in the streets and instead convince us to rely on Democratic and Republican politicians and the courts.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg insists it was an “isolated incident.” The problem was that cops “didn’t follow regulations.” Some of the cops are Black so the shooting was “not racially motivated.” The police version seeks to turn the victim into the criminal, alleging that Sean Bell tried to ram the cops with his car and that police fired the 50 shots out of “panic.” Big-business voices are now calling for the resignation of police commissioner Raymond Kelly and the five killer cops, or for “improved police training,” or for waiting for a “fair investigation.”

All this has one purpose: to cover up the real problem. The only ones on the scene with guns were the five cops did the shooting. Some witnesses say the plainclothes cop who fired first did not even identify himself before he started shooting at three men trapped in a car. One agent even emptied two magazines.

There are no excuses. The five cops must be held accountable for their deadly actions.

Improving police training or enforcing procedures is not the issue. This was not an isolated incident. The police killing of Bell, like that of Amadou Diallo in 1999, Patrick Dorismond in 2000, and Timothy Stansbury in 2004, is part of a pattern of police violence and racism in New York. The same is true nationwide, as brutally demonstrated by the November 21 police killing of an 88-year-old Black woman, Kathryn Johnston, in her Atlanta home.

These are all cases of how police routinely act as judge, jury, and executioner in working-class, especially Black and Latino, neighborhoods.

The fact that some of the cops who killed Bell are African-American changes nothing. A cop is a cop. The reality is that the three young men who were shot 50 times are Black—that is the racist pattern of police brutality familiar to many working people.

The entire capitalist “justice” system —police, courts, prisons, and laws —is designed to serve and protect the rule and property of the tiny class of billionaires against working people. Whenever workers go on strike, the cops are there to defend the bosses’ interests and to arrest or assault the workers. This is in contrast with the example of Cuba, where working people made a revolution, took political power, and overturned capitalist rule, putting an end to the cop brutality that comes with it.

Working people need to organize independently of the bosses’ government and parties—the Democrats and Republicans—and rely on our own mobilizations, and the largest working-class organizations, the unions, to advance the interests of the big majority. Jail the killer cops! All out for the December 6 rally!
 
 
Related articles:
Killing by cops in N.Y. sparks outrage
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