The Paul Street Report, 1.30.2023
Ask yourself: how long are you willing to put up with this?… This country’s police continue to kill more and more and more people, every single year… Even for a unit full of Black cops, the humanity of Black people counts as nothing. Because… THIS IS AMERICA. THIS is the system of capitalism-imperialism, and this system will require its enforcers to be brutal, savage, murdering PIGS who will violently maintain white supremacy so long as it exists
— Noche Diaz, National Spokesperson for the Revolution Club
So many names to say and chant and mourn aloud for so long: Tyre Nichols, Milton Hall, Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, Mike Brown, Terrence Shaun, Walter Scott, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Philando Castille, George Floyd, Sean Bell, Tamir Rice (a child), John Deng…I could go on and on and on.
How long?
Here are some stark statistics:
Number of civilians killed by police inside US police —
2017: 1,089
2018: 1,140
2019: 1,097
2020: 1,152
2021: 1,145
2022: 1,176
2017-2022: 6799.
Number of people killed by US police per day, 2017-2022: 3.1
Percentage of 2022 killings by police that involved an alleged violent crime: just 31% (recall that Eric Garner was killed by the NYPD for selling black market cigarettes in 2014, Walter Scott was killed in South Carolina after being pulled over for a broken taillight in 2015, George Floyd was killed after being arrested for allegedly passing bad $20 bills in Minneapolis, and Tyre Nichols [see below] was killed after being pulled over for reckless driving and savagely beaten in Memphis, Tennessee earlier this year).
Percentage of 2022 killings by police that involved the victims fleeing (either by foot or car) the cops: 32% (Walter Scott and Tyre Nichols were both killed for flight).
Blacks as a percentage of those killed by police in 2022: 24%, even though Blacks are just 13% of the US population.
Black Americans were three times more likely to be killed by police than whites between 2013 and 2022. In Chicago, Blacks were 25 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. In Minneapolis, they were 28 times more likely than whites to be killed by police.
Already this year, we have seen a spate of killings of nonwhites by police including the murder of a queer Latino forest defender (Manuel Teran) protesting the building of a giant police training center in Atlanta, the killing of three Black men within one week by the Los Angeles Police Department, and the brutal beating and murder of the 29 year old Black man Tyre Nichols after a traffic stop in Memphis, Tennessee last January 6th.
Shall we conclude that the Black Lives Matter and anti-racist/anti police brutality protests that have rolled across the country since 2012, peaking in 2014 (in response to the cop killings of Mike Brown and Eric Garner), 2015 (the remarkable Chicago movement that demanded and followed the release of the dash cam video showing the savage racist police murder of Laquan McDonald), and 2020 – the summer of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor – were nothing but exercises in futility, and that mass protest in the streets and public squares therefore does not accomplish anything?
Sadly, that would seem to be a reasonable inference. It seems clear that the racist police state continues to kill en masse regardless of rare/occasional post-protest prosecutions and convictions of racist killer cops like Laquan’s killer Jason Van Dyke (who is absurdly already out of prison and has been for more than a year), George Floyd’s murderer Derek Chauvin, Walter Scott’s killer Michael Slager, and Daunte Wright’s killer Kim Potter. The prosecution of killer cops is still very much the exception to the rule. The US political class does not wish to tie the hands of its racist mass-incarceration-ist gendarmes. The cops have a job to do: terrorize masses of people who have little opportunity and few resources for advancement and comfort in a savagely unequal society marked by extreme class disparity and overlapping racial apartheid.
The recent and quick firing, arrest, and indictment of Tyre Nichols’ “five” killers (there appear to have been more culprits) is also in the category of exception to the rule. The five arrested officers involved were all Black. It is unlikely that Memphis and racist Tennessee would have moved so quickly had the culprits been white.
It’s too much to say that mass protest has been irrelevant. The chances that officers will be arrested and charged for racist violence have certainly gone up since the birth of the Black Lives protest movement. Van Dyke, Slager, Chauvin, Potter and the five Memphis policemen would likely have escaped without prosecution in the absence of the movement. Cops have to think a bit more before they shoot, strangle, and otherwise brutalize civilians. Who knows, maybe there’d have been 1500 killings by cops in 2021 and again in 2022 but for the conviction of at least a tiny number of these badge-wearing executioners in the post-Laquan years.
Still, the numbers don’t lie and guesses about how many more folks might have had their lives ended by killer cops but for the Black Lives movement are just that — guesses. The lethal and racist police violence problem is alive and well (and yes, organized and institutional anti-Black racial terror can be carried out by Black gendarmes).
At the same time, it’s important to differentiate between different kinds of protests and movements. Insofar as protest has been shown to be powerless in recent US history, the problem isn’t with protest and social movements as such but with protests and social movements that are too immature, too elite-controlled, too loose, too episodic, too diffuse, and too unradical, Such movements are unable to effectively resist repression and co-optation. They often easily surrender before the thoroughly false promises that progressive change can be won within the establishmed dominant US electoral and policy institutions.
We’ve seen it again and again. The anti-Iraq War movement, already weakening in George W. Bush’s second term, was conclusively deeply-sixed by the anti-war pretense of the imperialist Libya-wrecker and drone-killer Barack “Empire’s New Clothes” Obama.
The leftish-populist Occupy Wall Street movement of the so-called Ninety-Nine Percent was all too easily crushed by the cops and Obama’s Department of Homeland Security. Some its remaining energy was then approproated by Obama’s campaign against the arch-One Percenter Mitt Romney. Lefty progressive populism later got sheep-dogged into the doomed Bernie Sanders major party electoral campaigns.
Before Occupy, the Wisconsin public worker uprising of early 2011 was all too easily shut down to make way for a ridiculous effort to electorally recall the state’s right-wing governor Scott Walker.
The capture of the Black Lives Matter rebellion by corporate foundations and opportunistic bourgeois-identitarian hustlers and real estate accumulators like Patricia Cullours is a depressing story told many times.
The giant George Floyd Rebellion failed to become a broad anti-fascist national movement. It stayed overly-focused on purely local demands (“community control of police”) and faded as popular hopes shifted to the presidential campaign of the longtime corporate racist Joe “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” Biden. After the Trump-approved killing of two civil rights protesters by the illegally AR-15-armed teen fascist Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August of 2020, “the left” left the streets to the rampaging fascist right, which was emboldened to assault the US Capitol in a last-ditch effort to keep its white nationalist cult figure Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump in office.
For many, hopes turned to the doddering strikebreaker Joe “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” Biden and the dollar-drenched Democratic Party. How lame. The dismal Dems then spent the past two years “in power” self-righteously failing to significantly challenge the right, which is poised to sweep back into full national triple branch control in early 2025. The orange-tinted racist “law and order” fascist runs free two-plus years after he tried to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral democracy and rule of law. The neoliberal Weimar Party (the demobiizing Dems) has not delivered gun reform, voting reform, labor law reform, or any other big reforms including of course police reform.
The “inauthentic opposition” party of “hollow resistance” (the dismal Dems) refused to put people in the streets to pre-empt the Christian fascist Supreme Court’s restoration of the female enslavement that is forced motherhood last summer. It opted instead to cynically exploit the decision it failed to fight as a way to contain its damage in the 2022 mid-term elections. The mass feminist protests before and after the sinister Dobbs v. Jackson ruling were for the Dems nothing more than props for the mid-terms, which they cynically claimed would bring a “blue wave” in “Roevember.”
The cynicism reached a mind-boggling low point when Joe “You Ain’t Black if You Don’t Vote for Me” Biden promised that the first thing he’d do after his party supposedly kept Congress (it lost the lower chamber of that body – some “Roevember”) in 2023 would be to sign a bill “codifying Roe as national law.” Biden knew damn well he would have lacked the Senate votes required for such a bill to have ever come to his desk. It was a totally and transparently disingenuous promise.
In response to this year’s sickening spate of racist killings by US killer cops, which will continue, we must take to the streets to build a protest movement that is resistant to the empty seductions of US electoral politics and that takes seriously a slogan I have heard in Black Lives protests since at least 2014: THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IS GUILTY AS HELL.
This shit has to stop but it won’t under the current reigning US-American system. Why has it gone on so long? Because the cops are actually doing their assigned job under that system when they murder and maim young Black people in the streets. These killer cops, whatever their skin color beneath the blue, are the USA, USA! They are not anomalies for “America.” They are not aberrations. They embody the ongoing slavecatcher DNA of the American System’s gendarmes going back to the Seventeenth Century.
Here are some important words (in italics below) worthy of extended quotation from the Los Angeles-based revolutionary communist Noche Diaz, national spokesperson for the Revolution Club:
Look at these [Memphis bodycam] videos. Look at this unmitigated savagery. See how these police pounce on [Tyre Nichols] from the beginning. How they hunt him down, and take turns beating him. Listen as these police sneer and taunt Tyre before AND after they’ve brutalized him. As one cop opines of his fellow cops that ‘I hope they stomp his ass.’ Hear them complaining and whining about how they hurt themselves, and sprayed themselves in the face with mace or pepper spray. Bonding and bragging afterwards about their takedown of Tyre Nichols.
Compare the barbarity, and utter inhumanity, of the police with the beautiful picture of Tyre’s life. We’ve learned how he worked the late shift at FedEx, and would return home to mom every day for his lunch break. He had a son, four years old. He started on his skateboard as a kid, and never put it down even when his pops told him he was getting too old for it. He loved to photograph sunsets.
Everyone who has been, or who will be, in the streets in rebellion is righteous to do so, and challenge others to join in. But we have to ask: How Long!?
And you are going to have to ask yourself: how long are you willing to put up with this? In Memphis they had every reform you could ask for. Body cams, Black cops, Black police chief, sensitivity training, rules and regulations that required police who saw other officers engaged in illegal activity to stop it. All of this did nothing to save Tyre’s life. All of this, and this country’s police continue to kill more and more and more people, every single year.
How much clearer can it be? Even for a unit full of Black cops, the humanity of Black people counts as nothing. Because whoever puts on that uniform—in whatever department, in whatever precinct, anywhere in this country—THIS IS AMERICA. THIS is the system of capitalism-imperialism, and this system will require its enforcers to be brutal, savage, murdering PIGS who will violently maintain white supremacy so long as it exists. That’s why we have to get rid of it.
Getting rid of this system means an ACTUAL REVOLUTION. NOT empty talk about change, or dealing with the “culture of policing” or “system of policing” within the existing system of this country. It means OVERTHROWING and DISMANTLING the system that these police enforce. It means a revolutionary people of millions defeating and dismantling the violent enforcers of this system and overthrowing its relations of power, of ownership, of ruling, and getting to a new society where people will only learn of the atrocity of America in museums and history books. It is not impossible, it is not even THAT HARD, to have a security force that is trained to sooner die themselves than act as vicious, cold-blooded MURDERERS. It is only impossible so long as we are forced to live under this system which, above all, counts people (especially Black people) as things to be exploited or discarded… a system which recklessly plunders the earth, despoils the environment, and jeopardizes the future of humanity… which continues the traditions of gender oppression and enslaving women in ways new and old… which makes the world unlivable for millions of people who are then demonized and terrorized at the border… and which blindly threatens to plunge into a new world war with potential for nuclear holocaust.
I couldn’t say it better myself. I won’t even try.
That’s the real shit. That’s the kind of “protest” talk and movement we need now. It’s the whole damn system that puts “trained murderers” in the streets to enforce a social order that is cancelling a livable future in the name of “law and order.”