The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.59/No.32           September 4, 1995 
 
 
The True Face Of The Police  

The recent exposures about racist cop violence described by Los Angeles ex-policeman Mark Fuhrman on taped interviews highlights once again the nature of police in capitalist society. While the tapes obtained by the defense attorneys in the O.J. Simpson murder trial do not shed light on his guilt or innocence, they do expose the corruption, frame-ups, and total disregard for the most elementary rights of human beings by the police.

Reflecting the raw bestiality permeating the cop profession, Fuhrman stated in a transcript obtained by the New York Times, "Most real good policemen understand that they would just love to take certain people and just take them to the alley and just blow their brains out." Fuhrman described a "kill party" where cops celebrate shooting some working person. There's "nothing better" than "a good beating....That's when everybody wants to get some beer," he said. "You're on the real high."

Fuhrman described a cop assault on a Latino housing project where they inflicted a beating and turned people's faces into "just mush." This is what the cops were trying to do to Rodney King, an assault the whole world witnessed on videotape. This is typical cop behavior ever "since policemen have been policemen," as Fuhrman puts it.

The tapes of Fuhrman supposedly were based on interviews for a screenplay on tensions between men and women in the Los Angeles Police Department. For working people, experience with cops is no film script or Hollywood movie. When Fuhrman describes how cops must cover their face when shooting someone in the temple to keep bone fragments out their eyes, that's reality for hundreds of Blacks and other oppressed nationalities.

In one segment of the tapes, Fuhrman states that "all these niggers in L.A. city government should be lined up against a wall" and shot along with others. Fuhrman reportedly uses the racist slur "nigger" no less than 30 times in the interviews he gave between 1985 and 1994.

But Fuhrman is not the only law enforcement official bantering racist epithets. At the August 12 rally to celebrate the stay of execution of death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal in Philadelphia, a police captain told a Black cop videotaping the demonstration, "You're sweating like a nigger." The captain, who is white, was the head of a special unit that handles special "sensitive racial issues." In addition to the brutal police conduct that has come to light as a result of the Abu-Jamal case, the Philadelphia police department is also in the spotlight over a massive campaign of racism and frame-ups. "The city is sorting through the wreckage left by rogue cops who went on a rampage of illegal arrests for five years in the 39th Police Precinct," reported the Philadelphia Inquirer. Whenever the rotten character of the police is exposed, the authorities are quick to point to "rogue" cops or "rotten apples" and act surprised.

"I don't know why people keep getting surprised when they hear stories about brutal L.A.P.D. officers. It's not anything new," Constance Rice, western regional director for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund Inc., told the Times. "Blacks, Latinos, poor whites and poor Asians have known about this sort of behavior for years."

Working people and the labor movement should get behind any fight against cop brutality. The police department is an anti-working-class, racist institution.

The brutality they inflict on working people is the same, whether in the Black community or on the picket line against workers striking the Detroit newspapers. We should demand that criminal cops be put behind bars whenever they carry out violent assaults against anyone.

 
 
 
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