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the role of the police
The following is a speech by Mark Ostapiak, a member of Youth for Socialist Action
(YSA). It has been transcribed to text for this website.
This evening I
would like to share with you my discontent with the police. Now some of you might be shocked by what I'm about to say. After all, you're thinking, they walk the beat, patrol the
street; they interogate, dare I say, intimidate potentially detrimental
individuals, groups, and organizations of society to protect law abiding
citizens. Their actions, albeit not always appropriate, should be
appreciatated because they're doing their job to "serve and protect."
Far more often than not, that job description is not an appropriate one, and in fact I would say that it would be
more fitting to say that police "beat and neglect." This cynicism is not
unwarranted, and I'd like to tell you why by citing documented incidents of
police misconduct. Some of these incidents are high-profile (in the
national news) while others are low profile, receiving a 30 second sound
bite or a few lines on the last page of the newspaper. Though, all of the
incidents illustrate who these dubious bullies in blue serve.
Lets start with a few recent examples that happened to activists a lot like you and I. Last year police in Philadelphia took action against a group of
peaceful protestors who were constructing puppets in a west Philadelphia
warehouse. All 80 of the people in the warehouse were arrested on the
charge that they were conspirators. What was confiscated as "criminal
evidence" turned out to be materials for puppet making: chicken wire and PVC
pipe. They also confiscated kerosene soaked in rags used to make torches
for fire jugglers.
This past year in Minneapolis police raided a duplex housing,
Sister's Camelot, which distributes free food to the hungry there.
Computers were confiscated, and the organization, now bankrupt, has been
evicted. It gets worse.
In 1998 in Santa Cruz California, a homeless man, John Dine, known
by the police for his peaceful protests against a law banning homeless
people from sleeping in the streets, was shot to death by Santa Cruz
policeman, Conor Carey. An eyewitness quoted in the San Jose Mercury News
said, "I had a perfect bird's-eye view of the whole thing. It looked like
the cops just got out of their car and shot him. I was shocked... The man
didn't put his arms up or anything. I didn't see him display any type of
weapon." Another witness corroborated that account in a statement made on
video before he left town in fear for his life. He reported that police
threatened him on two separate occassions. He claimed a cop told him to
"shut up or you may vanish." Another told him to "keep quiet about what you
saw."
On the other side of the country in New York City, police misconduct
was exemplified by their actions at a peaceful funeral procession for
Patrick Dorismond, a Black man that was shot by the NYPD as he stood
unarmed. Mimi Rosenberg, a reporter for WBAI Pacifica who attended the
funeral witnessed the police incite a riot where, among other things, they
attacked a 16 year old pregnant woman, seized an 80 year old man from the
stoop of a building, and beat a teenaged girl as she lay on the ground.
This past year, in a most sickening case that proves cops can kill
with impunity, four New York City police officers were acquitted of all
charges in the shooting death of an immigrant from Guinea, Amadou Diallo.
He was killed when these officers shot him 41 times as he stood unarmed.
Knowing that one bullet can potentially kill a person, and 10 or 11 shots
assures a kill, does it evoke the wonder that these cops, all white,
continued to shoot Diallo, a Black man, to let out their racist aggressions?
Is it far fetched to think this in a society that tolerates and even fosters
racism?
Police racism is credible. Lets look at some figures in
Minneapolis. For taking a drink in public police arrest Blacks at a ratio
of 11 to 1 for whites. A recent study by the Minneapolis Star Tribune which
examined the racial breakdown of all persons arrested and jailed in the past
5 years showed the following Black to white arrest ratios: prostitution, 10
to 1; trespassing, 19 to 1; lurking 27 to 1; begging 11 to 1, etc.
Inspector Tim Dolan of Minneapolis was quoted as saying, "Tell you what, I
wouldn't want to be a minority driving through a problem area of Minneapolis
with a headlight out because you're gonna be stopped."
Police misconduct does result in disciplinary action, but a report
put out last year announing the results of a 3 year study of the internal
NYPD disciplinary system reveals that police misconduct is not taken very
seriously. Out of 664 cops cited for misconduct only 6 have been dismissed
from the force. The report further revealed that 206 of those cops were
never charged with wrongdoing by the NYPD and 340 were given only a slap on
the wrist penalty such as verbal reprimands and loss of vacation time.
What can be said about all these terrible facts? To put it plainly, the
cops are doing their job. Their actions shouldn't be so surprising when
knowing who they really serve. They're doing what is expected of them by
the State. Since they work for the State, they are granted the right to
enforce the law by intimidation to get the point across that it is foolhardy
and even dangerous to oppose the State. But the greatest problem isn't the
many incidences of police misconduct; rather, it's the State's
institutionalized malpractice of power. Almost since its conception this
monolithic infrastructure has resorted to corrupt politics and intimidation,
and the police are a manifestation of the State's corrupt politics.
Vladimir Lenin had this to say in his book State and Revolution: "The state
is an organization of the particular exploiting class for the maintenance of
its external conditions of production and therefore especially for the
purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of
oppression determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom,
wage labor, etc). The state rose to keep class antagonisms in check, but
because it arose, at the same time in the midst of the conflict of these
classes, it is as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically
dominant class which through the medium of the state, becomes also the
politically dominant class and thus acquires new means of holding down and
exploiting the oppressed class."
The means of holding down and exploiting
the oppressed class including poor housing, poor medicine, alcoholism, and
unemployment breeds disenchantment with the State and at times causes
tumultuous upheavals by this subordinate class. The police forcefully and
sometimes violently stop these provoked masses who are then vilified in
media, and the ruling class takes a deep breath and pats itself on the back.
The status quo remains.
Even organized labor, with a long history of legal
opposition to corporate interests, has been vilified. The United States
Supreme Court declared that Unions were "criminal conspiracies," and the
"the Constitution was... based upon the concept that the fundamental private
rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach
of popular majorities." This was the sentiment of the State here in America
even in 1917 when a federal agency by the name of the Auxiliary to the US
Department of Justice enforced strict measures upon labor unions. In the
book Agents of Repression, Howard Zinn recounts:
In early September 1917, Department of Justice agents made simultaneous
raids
on forty-eight Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) meeting halls across
the
country, seizing correspondence and literature that would become courtroom
evidence. Later that month, 165 IWW leaders were arrested for conspiracy to
hinder the draft, encourage desertion [in 1941 similar charges were brought
against
James P. Cannon and the SWP under the Smith Act], and intimidate
others in connection with labor disputes. One hundred and one went on trial
(en masse) in April 1918; it lasted five months, the longest criminal trial
in history
up to that time... The jury (several selected from the rank of the American
Protective
League) found them guilty. The judge sentenced IWW president William "Big
Bill"
Hayward and fourteen others to twenty years in prison; thirty-three were
given ten
years, the rest shorter sentences. They were fined a total of $2,500,000.
The IWW
was shattered.
To further illustrate how the State aggressively tried to keep the
oppressed class down I'll tell you about how the FBI sought to undermine the
Black Panther Party (BPP). It created a counterintelligence agency called
the COINTELPRO who designed tactics to divide, conquer, and weaken an
organization in diverse ways. It was initially created to disrupt the
American Communist Party. They did this by (1) Eavesdropping (wiretaps,
mail tampering) (2)Bogus mail---the fabrication of correspondence between
members of targetted groups or between groups. It was designed to foster
splits within or between organizations (3)Disinformation or "Gray
Propaganda." This is the systematically released disinformation to the
press and electronic media concerning groups and individuals designed to
descredit them. (4)Fabrication of Evidence. The following quote by Noam
Chomsky illustrates what this means with respect to the BPP:
A top secret Special Report for the president in June 1970 gives
some insight
into the motivation for the actions undertaken by the government to destroy
the
BPP. The report describes the party as "the most active and dangerous black
extremist group in the United States." Its "hard core members" were
estimated at
800, but "a recent poll indicates that approzimately 25 percent of the black
population
has a great respect for the BPP, including 43 percent of blacks under 21
years of age."
On the basis of such estimates of the potential of the party, the repressive
apparatus of the
state proceeded against it to ensure that it did not succeed in organizing
as a substantial
social or political force. We may add that in this case, government
repression proved quite successful.
Their effective repression came in the form of cheap herion pumped
into the community at the urging of the FBI.
History however provides encouraging examples of how we can challenge the
police and the State's institutionalized malpractice of power. It all comes
down to organizing and taking to the streets in solidarity with our
oppressed brothers and sisters. The Boleshevik Revolution of 1917 is a
historical benchmark for how the working class can overthrow its oppressor.
Its basic idea of a struggle of the oppressed was recently demonstrated by
an organized population of Tepatepec in Mexico. They overpowered and brought before
the peoples' court the cops who brutally attacked students that went on
strike at the local teachers college in Mexico City. The students' strike
was an opposition to the raised tuition costs that were difficult to pay for
the poor rural students.
Organized labor with a revolutionary aim toward a socialist system
based on the needs of people is our best hope to overcome the
institutionalized malpractice of the State because it has a strong history
of victories over oppressive, profit-driven corporate interests. Onward to revoution!
