Demilitarize the cops under community control!
St. Louis County Police in Ferguson.
Massive militarization of police forces has intensified a racist
Rambo mentality among U.S. cops, as they disproportionately kill young
African American men with impunity. Among the latest victims is Michael
Brown, an 18-year-old, college-bound resident of Ferguson, Missouri, a
poor, highly segregated, black suburb of St. Louis that is under the
thumb of a white government and police force.
Michael’s crime? Walking while black. To compound the injustice of
this present-day lynching of an unarmed youth, the cops rolled out
tanks, tear gas, rubber bullets, and military combat gear in an attempt
to stop the justifiable protests that erupted. Evoking images of the Jim
Crow south, police turned dogs on the protesters. They jailed news
media and set up a no-fly zone to block reporters from filming the
assaults. Protesters responded with signs reading “I am a man” and “I am
a woman,” echoing those carried by Memphis sanitation workers in 1968.
New York City
Why is police terror ramping up?
As the economic system confronts an ever-deepening crisis,
capitalism relies more and more upon divide and conquer. The bosses need
an unemployed or jailed army of workers who can be scapegoated for the
ills showering down upon the population at large.
Emily Woo Yamasaki, a Freedom Socialist Party activist in Harlem, says
NYPD raids on multiple housing projects and mass arrests in Harlem this
past June were carried out like a military invasion, terrorizing and
brutalizing residents of all ages. She links the raids to city attempts
to privatize public housing and to the drive for mass incarceration,
which aims to crush resistance to an unjust system while fueling the
profits of private prisons.
Black and brown men are the new “terrorists;” immigrants are “stealing
jobs;” and unionists are “thugs.” These lies fuel the bosses’ continued
attacks on everyone’s standard of living. Youth of color bear the brunt
through an astronomical unemployment rate and the poverty-to-prison
pipeline.
The system isn’t “broken” as some claim, it is working exactly as it is
supposed to. Capitalism sees only one way out of the economic crisis —
to drive down wages and eliminate the social safety net — and it must
stifle Ferguson-type protests in order to do that.
Time for united action!
• Demand an end to the police violence in Ferguson. The residents
don’t need increased militarization by the National Guard, they need
economic and political justice.
• Build a movement that fights for immediate needs such as jobs,
education and community control of the police, but don’t stop there —
• Come together to replace the bigoted capitalist system, which
forces hardship and want on the many, with a socialist world of shared
abundance and equality of all races and oppressed peoples.
Edit:A video from this article by Washington Post, identifies what military riot gear was provided to the Ferguson Police Department by the U.S. Pentagon.
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