Vol. 76/No. 24      June 18, 2012

Below is a statement by Dan Fein, Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. Senate in New York.

The Socialist Workers Party encourages working people to turn out for the June 17 march to protest the New York Police Department’s anti-working-class and racist stop-and-frisk operations.

The stops—directed disproportionately against young Black and Latino men—represent not only a direct assault on Fourth Amendment protections against arbitrary search and seizures. They are part of a broader assault on the rights of working people in the U.S., including the unparalleled number of workers behind bars or otherwise caught up in the capitalists’ criminal “justice” system. And the increasing curbs on workers’ rights go hand in hand with boss assaults on our wages and working conditions, accelerated by the deepening crisis of capitalism.

The propertied rulers try to convince working people that the right of cops to stop and frisk us whenever they want is necessary to combat crime—to protect us from each other. We must reject this view—both of the role of the cops and our view of ourselves, the working class.

The police exist to maintain social relations of capitalism, back the political rule of the capitalist class and keep working people in our place—whether we are walking down the street, on the picket line or at a social protest.

We have no interest in working with their police to “reform” stop and frisk. What we need to do is fight to push them back as far as we can.

Freddy Williams, who stopped to talk when I was campaigning on a street corner in Bedford-Stuyvesant to build the June 17 demonstration, explained it well: “At one time police could not come into our neighborhood and pounce on someone because we had unity. We would stand up.”

Their “war on crime” is directed against the working class as a whole. On the other hand, the reality that some workers prey on each other is one of our problems. It is a reflection of the dog-eat-dog values of bourgeois society that infect our class. The rulers then rationalize their corrupt and repressive police forces on grounds that “morally depraved” sections of the populace must be “kept under control.” But breakdowns in working-class solidarity are not fixed by the brutality of capitalist justice or prison life, just the opposite.

Through collective struggle, from the fight against police repression to other working-class battles, we can forge solidarity that advances a sense of our self-worth, turning our backs on the rulers’ view of us, and above all its reflection in ourselves and our actions toward each other.

The Socialist Workers Party campaign calls on working people to join us, and join with us on June 17 and beyond.
 
 
Related articles:
Black, labor groups call NY protest against ‘stop and frisk’  
 
 
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