https://themilitant.com/2020/05/16/cops-brutalities-serve-and-protect-capitalist-exploitation/
Cops’ brutalities ‘serve and protect’ capitalist exploitation
article
BY NAOMI CRAINE
Vol. 84/No. 20
May 25, 2020
Cellphone video shows Ariel Roman being tackled, pepper-sprayed by two
cops on Chicago subway station Feb. 28, then they shot him twice. His
crime? He
walked between cars. figure
Cellphone video shows Ariel Roman being tackled, pepper-sprayed by two
cops on Chicago subway station Feb. 28, then they shot him twice. His
crime? He
walked between cars.
Cellphone video shows Ariel Roman being tackled, pepper-sprayed by two
cops on Chicago subway station Feb. 28, then they shot him twice. His
crime? He
walked between cars. figure end
CHICAGO — The videos were shocking enough to briefly break through the
coronavirus media barrage and make national headlines. Two Chicago cops
used a Taser,
pepper-sprayed and then shot an unarmed man in a downtown subway station
during rush hour Feb. 28. His “crime?” Walking between cars on a moving
train.
Ariel Roman, a 33-year-old short-order cook who is Latino, was suffering
a panic attack, his attorneys say. Surveillance videos show police
officers Melvina
Bogard and Bernard Butler, both of whom are Black, pursuing Roman as he
gets off the train, grabbing him as he tries to walk away, and tackling
him to
the ground. A bystander recorded much of the struggle that ensued with
his cellphone.
Trying to handcuff Roman, both officers stun him with their Tasers.
Butler can be heard at least twice telling Bogard to “shoot him.” At one
point Roman
stands up, apparently wiping pepper spray from his eyes, and Bogard
shoots him in the stomach at close range. Roman then breaks free and
runs up a nearby
escalator. The cops follow, and a second shot rings out. That bullet
lodged in his buttocks. Amazingly he wasn’t killed, but suffered major
injuries.
The video rapidly went viral when it was posted on social media. Two
months later, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability released
additional footage
from surveillance and police body cameras, drawing national attention to
the case.
Roman is suing the City of Chicago and the two cops. Bogard and Butler
were pulled off the street and put on paid administrative duty. But no
criminal
charges have been filed against them so far.
Role of cops in capitalist society
On Feb. 29, the day after the shooting, a previously planned rally
against police brutality was moved to the entrance of the subway station
where Roman
was shot. Many of the protesters called for the city to form a new
Civilian Police Accountability Council, supposedly to rein in the cops.
“There’s no reform that’s going to change the fundamental character of
the police in capitalist society, which is to ‘serve and protect’ the
ruling class
at the expense of working people,” I said when I spoke there as the
Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate. “We need to mobilize
working people
to demand the prosecution of the cops who carried out this outrageous
attack.”
In the weeks since then, statewide “stay at home” lockdown orders have
put obstacles in the way of more protests. What the cops visited on
Roman is daily
fare for working people in the largely African American and Latino
neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, who face neighborhood
checkpoints and harassment
in the name of enforcing the lockdown.
At the same time, the cops make no serious attempt to stop the ongoing
gang violence that costs hundreds of lives every year in Chicago. In
fact, many
cops profit from involvement with gangs and drugs.
The night of May 2 cops broke up several house parties where young
people had gathered on the South and West Sides. At the same time at
least 21 people
were shot across the city that night, two fatally. No arrests have been
made.
This is business as usual here. The cops’ attitude is “let them kill
each other.”
“Chicago Police have failed to make an arrest in 85 percent of the
violent crimes committed with firearms that have taken place in the city
since 2001,”
The Trace paper and TV station WTTW reported last November. During the
same period “police data shows 610,000 arrests for charges of possessing
or purchasing
marijuana or other illegal drugs.”
“They’ll get a person for marijuana before they’ll get a person for
murder,” Angela McCray told The Trace. Two of her sons were killed by
gunfire, in 2015
and 2017. She said both times the cops wouldn’t even come to take a
statement from them as they lay injured in the hospital.
No “reform” under capitalism will change this situation. Cop brutality
is an intrinsic part of capitalist rule. Its role — as part of the
rulers’ criminal
“justice” system — is to intimidate and punish workers. Their victims
are disproportionately Black and Latino.
What we must do today is build a fighting labor movement with a
revolutionary program — helping lead fights for jobs, for amnesty for
undocumented immigrants,
and against police brutality. This can open the road to unite working
people in our millions to fight to take political power from the
capitalist class.
As was the experience in both the rise of industrial unions in the 1930s
and in the fight to overthrow Jim Crow segregation in the 1950s and
’60s, real
working-class struggles draw in broader layers, including those who
today carry out anti-social activity, and involve them in forging
solidarity with other
workers.
It is only through growing struggles against the brutalities of
capitalism that working people can begin to overcome the distortions of
human potential
and character that exist today.
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