The Militant -April 27, 2015 --Join growing fight against cop brutality!

Vol. 79/No. 15 April 27, 2015

(editorial)
Join growing fight against cop brutality!

For decades, cops from one end of the country to the other have brutalized workers — and disproportionately workers who are Black — with impunity. They do so in the interests of the propertied rulers, as part of maintaining capitalist rule over the millions of toilers their system exploits and oppresses.

It’s not a question of “rogue” cops, as Jack Barnes, the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, said about the Los Angeles cops who beat Rodney King in 1991. “We are talking about a social phenomenon,” Barnes said, “the product of a policy that trains, coarsens, and makes it profitable for cops to mete out such brutal punishment.”

But new winds are blowing today. Protests against cop killings and beatings of working people over the last year have forged a growing alliance of unionists, Black rights fighters and others who take to the streets to protest every new assault. Public protests get more publicity, encourage others to act, win broader solidarity, increase fighters’ confidence and reinforce ongoing struggles.

And these fights are strengthened by growing working-class resistance against the grinding offensive of the bosses aimed at making us pay for today’s crisis of their capitalist system. Workers fighting for $15 and a union or walking the picket line on the first national oil strike in more than 30 years see links between their fight and their sisters and brothers fighting cop violence. And vice versa.

When protesters hit the streets after the cold-blooded killing of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and a courageous bystander gave his family a video of cop Michael Slager firing eight bullets into Scott’s back as he fled unarmed, the news flashed around the world. The video has been watched by millions. The authorities saw no choice but to arrest, charge and fire the cop.

That doesn’t mean the fight is over. As longshore unionist Leonard Riley said, “We’re not overly impressed by the arrest and charges. We’re more concerned now that they carry out a real prosecution.”

The function of police in capitalist society is to serve and protect the capitalist rulers and to intimidate and divide the working class. They aim their fire disproportionately at the layers of the class that have a history of resistance.

From the Civil War to Radical Reconstruction to the mass proletarian movement that toppled Jim Crow in the 1950s and ’60s, as well as in the construction of the industrial union movement in the 1930s and since, Black workers have been among the most determined fighters in class battles in the U.S.

Participating in the battle against police brutality is an issue of central importance for the working class. It is our fight. It is part of awakening, as Malcolm X said, to our humanity, to our self-worth. It is part of building a revolutionary proletarian movement that can overthrow the dictatorship of capital and remove the root cause of capitalist violence and oppression.

We must be ready to go to Charleston, to Ferguson, to Staten Island or wherever resistance against police brutality breaks out.