Stop Police Abuse Now! Build Inter-Communal Resistance and Community Self-Defense by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action Los Angeles/People Against Racist Terror (ARA-LA/PART) One year ago, in a particularly blatant and unusually well-documented police Courts Building), 210 West Temple St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. Proceedings killing, Oscar Grant was shot and killed in Oakland CA while restrained on a in Dept. 104 - Judge Perry’s courtroom are scheduled for 8:30 AM. People metro station, by Bay Area Rapid Transit cop Johannes Mehserle. Even though will rally outside starting at 7:00 AM, with several people on line early to get Grant was unarmed, posed no threat and was shot point blank, Mehserle was inside the courtroom. initially not even questioned, and was allowed to resign and leave the state until Oakland residents and others outraged by the killing and the injustice But as unprecedented as a murder prosecution of a cop may be in California, we should not imagine that justice can be found in the courts. Police killings and rose up in righteous anger. More than 100 people were arrested by Oakland shootings, almost all carried out with impunity, are epidemic in the U.S. And despite cops, often brutally, but the forceful community resistance forced the Alameda a few highly publicized cases of officers being shot, the number of police fatalities County District Attorney to file murder charges against Mehserle, the first time and line-of-duty shootings, never very high, actually registered historic lows over a California cop has ever been charged with murder for an on-duty shooting. the past year. Meanwhile, militarization of the police, as well as consolidation of Fearing further uprisings in Oakland, particularly after another shooting incident local police forces into joint anti-terrorist task forces with the FBI and into federally- in the city left Lovelle Mixon and two Oakland cops dead, the courts approved a organized immigration-enforcement campaigns, continue. Moreover, the killings, change of venue to Los Angeles. The initial L.A. proceedings were scheduled, as typically of Black and indigenous/Mexicano youth by cops of European descent, we went to press, for January 8, 2010, and local activists (including ARA-LA) are are the tip of the iceberg, resting atop more numerous beatings, abuse, traffic stops organizing to seek justice for Oscar Grant. A demonstration is scheduled at Clara and searches and stop-and-frisk operations on the streets. “Driving while Black (or Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center (commonly referred to as the Criminal Brown)” has become a cliché. Nor are the police alone involved in such racism and injustice. The entire criminal “justice” system is a colonial operation, in which, for example, a higher percentage of Black drug-users and of social control. As the MLN explained in “Disarm the that criminalize the simple association of youth of color. sellers are arrested than of white drug users and dealers. Police or Arm the People,” the Trilateral Commission The prison abolition movement must connect up with the Of those arrested, a progressively higher percentage of identified an “excess of democracy” and the unacceptable opponents of police abuse. Blacks are charged, tried, convicted and sentenced, and demands of communities of color as the main threat to they are sentenced to longer terms. The vast increase in the Empire. Samuel Huntington, a chief theoretician of On the basis of self-determination and respect for incarceration over the past 3 decades under the so-called the Trilateral, prescribed “spatial deconcentration” to sovereignty, we must build intercommunal solidarity and “war on drugs,” and the regime of harsh sentencing alleviate the threat of rebellion by the “inner city” by resistance. People of European descent have a particular and restricted parole, has come overwhelmingly at the dispersing residents to the outskirts (as they are in Latin responsibility to take up that struggle, recognizing the expense of young people of color. The police and the American, African and Asian cities). That approach leading role of colonized communities. But all oppressed courts serve as a transmission belt for such youth from is known more commonly as ethnic cleansing; more people must come together whenever anyone is violated under-funded schools to well-endowed prisons. euphemistically as gentrification. Police carry out this by the cops, regardless of nationality or ethnicity. The strategy as an occupying army in communities of color link must be made between the militarization of local Thirty years ago, a book produced by the Movimiento and an internal border patrol in more privileged areas. police forces and of the border with the larger military de Liberacion Nacional (MLN), then a joint Puerto When COINTELPRO killed and framed up Panthers like focus of the Empire globally, and the use of coercive Rican-Mexicano organization, put forward an analysis Bunchy Carter and Geronimo ji Jaga, prisons held fewer power to maintain domination and economic exploitation of and solution to this problem in its very title: “Disarm than 200,000 – today, over 2,200,000. of land, labor and resources. the Police or Arm the People.” The MLN outlined the development of organized police forces in the U.S. to the This is the social and historical context for the ongoing Finally, we must recognize that power concedes nothing class relations of colonialism and capitalism, beginning plague of racial profiling, police killings, militarization without a struggle. The long and debilitating string of after the US war of aggression and conquest against of ‘law enforcement,’ and mass criminalization and failures that have created a crippling sense of defeatism Mexico. Then, vigilante forces of settlers were organized incarceration that is exemplified in the killing of Oscar among many oppressed and colonized people inside the into the Texas and Arizona Rangers to subdue the Grant. It is vital to establish this context because despite US dates from the defeats inflicted by COINTELPRO resistance of the indigenous Mexicano population. After decades of struggles for justice for particular victims and and the resulting on-going absence of any fighting the Civil War, when slavery and private slave patrols their families, despite lawsuits, civilian review boards, capacity on the people’s side of the ledger. All our were ended, the state assumed responsibility for control marches and street protests, this plague continues. That actions in confronting police abuse and other social, of the African population, and plantations were converted means we must understand more deeply the causes of economic and even environmental ills, must be oriented into (still-existing) prisons so that slavery could continue the problem and the nature of the inadequacies of our at rebuilding the fighting capacity of the people.. under the constitutionally authorized condition of “penal existing strategies and tactics. servitude.” Later still, after the Indian Wars, settlement The persistence of police abuse means it is systemic, and of the interior, building of the transcontinental railroads The roots of the problem in colonialism and capitalism the whole society must be changed. We must strengthen and development of the industrial corporate capitalist mean that only revolutionary principles can guide us our resistance and our resolve to see the struggle through system, urbanization and the importation of large to a successful counter-strategy. It establishes a certain to the final overthrow of a criminal, destructive system numbers of Asian and eastern and southern European minimum tactical unity for effective action in any and its replacement with a cooperative, sustainable, proletarians led to the development of city police forces. particular case and a direction for building strategically decolonized social system. This will initiate a dynamic They augmented the private goon squads and Pinkertons long term. First, we must understand that the problem process that will begin to shift the balance of power hired by the robber barons to discipline their work force. is not simply ‘police misconduct,’ but the conduct of between the forces of repression arrayed against us and policing under policies set by civilian administrations the force of resistance, solidarity, unity and creativity that With the emergence of world-wide communist and and political authorities to enforce colonial and capitalist we marshal. anarchist labor movements in the early 20th Century, exploitation. “Good cops” and “bad cops” are simply federal police forces (such as the FBI) were created. roles played (often alternately by the same cops) to Based on these perspectives, ARA-LA is participating in Mass white supremacist forces like the reborn Ku Klux intimidate and control suspects. Community-oriented the struggle for justice for Oscar Grant, whose killer will Klan were deputized to police anti-war dissidents and policing, far from being a solution, is in fact part of the be tried right here in L.A. Such an effort must include labor organizers, and to “Americanize” the immigrant same militarization, described by its advocates in police defending those facing repression for resisting police population. Later US victory in World War II, along with journals as “the domestic equivalent of psychological abuse, such as JR Varney, Minster of Information of the the victories of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist forces operations in the military, to control the thinking of the Prisoners