Tyre Nichols is another victim of the relentless assault of the police on human dignity and life.
Nichols’ brutal murder in January brought the movement for police reform and accountability back into public view and also widens and deepens the debate. A key issue is that Black police officers viciously beat a Black man to death. This act cannot be attributed solely to racist cops, although white supremacy and racism are endemic to policing, but also to the role of police in society, regardless of the color of the cops’ skin, their gender or ethnic origins.
In order to end police terror and violence in our communities, we must understand what the police are and what they are designed to do. The police are bodies of armed people and are part of the State, the instrument of class control, force and violence in our government. The main role of the State is to defend capitalist private property.
Whoever controls the State, controls the police.
In the United States, the primary job of the police is to protect the capitalists’ exploitation and continued accumulation of wealth and to prevent the American people from achieving the goals of the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Let’s be clear. Our entire legal system, all our institutions, are set up to grow and protect private wealth that grows from robbery and corruption. If the main function of the police were to stop crime, they would arrest the capitalists, the true criminals. Instead:
- if starving people are in front of a grocery store, police will protect the food, not distribute it.
- If unhoused people are demanding access to empty homes, police will protect the owners
- If we are protesting environmental destruction, police will protect the polluters
- If …
Terror is a key tactic that the police use to do their job. Thus, the traffic stop of Tyre Nichols and the following vicious brutality was not a random act by rogue cops. It is part of a systematic suppression of all poor, displaced and working people regardless of the color of their skins, their gender identity or their ethnic origin. The history of our country puts African American people at the heart of the growing displaced class that must abolish private property to survive.
As the founders of the United States wrote in the Declaration of Independence:
“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
We do not need to reform the police; we need to end the capitalist rule of our country and create a new society organized to meet the needs of the people and the planet.
March/April 2023 Vol33. Ed2
This article originated in Rally, Comrades
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
Free to reproduce unless otherwise marked.
Please include this message with any reproduction.
