Thousands of workers, youth, and others have been demonstrating in the streets of New York for nearly two months demanding the arrest and prosecution of the four cops who killed Amadou Diallo February 4. These actions are an important part of the resistance by workers and farmers to the attacks by the capitalist class on the work and living conditions of those who toil for a living and on our democratic rights.
The N.Y. Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists join with the thousands who are protesting this brutal and racist killing. We urge all working people and youth to turn out to these actions, and organize other speak outs, to demand: "Justice for Amadou Diallo! Jail the guilty cops now!" With the March 25 indictment of the four cops, now is a critical time to keep the picket lines up, demanding their conviction. The most consistent demonstrations have been taking place outside NY police headquarters at One Police Plaza everyday beginning at 11:30 a.m. Construction workers, United Auto Workers members, UPS drivers, nurses, and other working people have been meeting each other, and other fighters, in these actions. Join them!
The determination by thousands to stand in solidarity with the Diallo family and other victims of police brutality - from Anthony Baez to Abner Louima - have made it harder for the city administration of Rudolph Giuliani, the New York city council that's dominated by the Democratic Party, and other capitalist politicians to cover up this crime by the N.Y. police. The indictment of the four cops on March 25 marks an initial victory in the struggle and makes it all the more important to continue the mobilizations. The space for such actions has been widened by differences among the rulers on how to handle this crisis and shore up the image of the NYPD (New York Police Department). Let's use it!
Giuliani, city council Republican minority leader Thomas Ognibene, and other bourgeois politicians have been trying to justify and defend the course of the city administration, and its predecessors, of enlarging the NYPD and giving the cops more powers and more lethal weapons to use against working people. They credit Giuliani for so-called lower crime rates and "safer" neighborhoods - that is, safer for the middle class and the superrich from those they describe as the "underclass." Giuliani and Co. have in fact made the blunder of their life. Giuliani's political days are now numbered because tens of thousands of working people have refused to accept another brutal killing by the cops of a Black man.
Many liberals are trying to confuse working people by saying the solution is ridding the police of "bad apples" and calling for federal investigations and a "reformed" police department with more Black and Latino cops.
There are no "good" and "bad" cops. The duty of cops is to take orders from their capitalist masters, which means breaking strikes, smashing demonstrations, and beating particularly Black, Puerto Rican, and Chicano heads. That was the case with the cop attacks on demonstrations of construction workers and taxi drivers last year.
The picketing of the offices of the New Yorker magazine by hundreds of N.Y. cops demanding an apology for a cartoon that dramatized the normalcy with which the cops empty their weapons on working people -just like the hail of 41 bullets they shot against Diallo - show the police are not asking for an end to these duties. That would mean the end of their jobs. They want more leeway to flout constitutionally guaranteed liberties. The police force is in fact a breeding ground for fascist goons, whom the bosses will use to put down any challenge to their privileges and power by the labor movement.
There is no law that says a person must be a cop. They willingly choose to be cops. They ask to serve as armed protectors of the ruling class and rapidly become corrupted. It is well known that the mercenary wages cops receive are supplemented by bribes and payoffs, often received from the very racketeers they are supposedly protecting the people from. Their privileged status gives them considerable immunity from legal action. A cop is a cop is a cop!
The killing of Diallo is symptomatic of an acceleration in police brutality, which is a piece of other measures taken by the city and federal governments to use the repressive agencies of their state and narrow democratic rights. These include:
* Use of semiautomatic weapons by the police (originally introduced by the Democratic Party administration of former New York City mayor David Dinkins), lifting restrictions on the amount of bullets in each clip and use of more deadly hollow-tip bullets (under Republican Giuliani);
* Confiscating people's cars - taking away one's property, which is detrimental for many workers who have no other way to get to their jobs - just if a cop accuses you of having a drop of alcohol in your blood above the legal limit;
* Wider use of the "street crime" unit of the NYPD who boast of "owning the night"; cop Kenneth Boss, a member of this unit, was one of the four involved in the Diallo killing and is currently under investigation for the shooting death of Patrick Bailey.
This is part of a wider crackdown on sections of the working class whom the bosses try to scapegoat for the crisis of their system and turn them into pariahs, in order to divide and rule. That's why a Virginia federal court outlawed the Supreme Court Miranda ruling recently, why the Clinton administration has turned la migra into the most heavily armed federal cop agency and has deported a record 300,000 immigrant workers in the last two years, and why the bourgeoisie is using the death penalty more and more.
The Clinton administration's plans for a North American command - that would allow the military to carry out police functions inside the U.S. - shows how these steps are part of Washington's attempts to buy up, police, and dominate the world -from Iraq to Yugoslavia to China.
What the capitalist class has in store for toilers in Yugoslavia and Iraq is the same the cops did in the Diallo killing. Fighters against cop brutality have a big stake in including in their demands opposition to the frequent U.S. bombings of Iraq and the brutal NATO assault on Yugoslavia.
The capitalists are doing this because they anticipate a social crisis that could spin out of their control - a crisis that has already swept southeast Asia, Russia, and is spreading in Latin America. In the middle of what they describe as the longest U.S. economic upswing in decades, they are talking about privatizing Social Security and have already thrown millions of working people off welfare and onto the streets without jobs. In New York, the state has put in place more stringent requirements for accepting people into public shelter who don't have a roof over their heads. Unemployment, counting those who are no longer looking for a job, is a staggering 50 percent for youth who are Black.
When they talk about lower "crime rates" they fail to mention these have been accomplished not by improving social conditions for working people but by toughening their laws, which by definition creates more "criminals," and by locking up record numbers of people.
Today, 1 in every 150 U.S. residents is behind bars, the highest incarceration rate in any country. The rulers try to get assent among the middle classes and better-off layers of workers for wider use of police violence, more arrests of anyone who fits the "profile" of a potential "criminal," and longer sentences to "protect the quality of life" of those who are rich from the "underclass" -that is, working people and youth without jobs and decent living conditions.
An increasing number of militant workers and farmers, however - from miners who struck Freeman Coal in Illinois last year to oil workers in Texas fighting a three-year-long lockout by Crown Petroleum to farmers fighting USDA discrimination - are gaining experience in confronting the repressive powers of the state, from the FBI, to the INS and local police, as they struggle against cutbacks in wages, speedup, racist discrimination, and loss of their land. It is among these toilers that all those demanding justice for Diallo will find their best allies.
In the process many will discover that the only way to get rid of police brutality and racism once and for all is to end the system of class exploitation - capitalism - and replace it with one that puts human needs and solidarity above profits - socialism.
For these reasons it's important to explain that working people don't need a "reformed" police department or more cops who are Black. We need to join the street mobilizations and demand: Arrest, prosecute, and jail the cops who killed Amadou Diallo now!