PHOTO/ ZACH NESMITH
Hardly a week goes by that there isn’t some new video going viral on the Internet clearly showing police officers brutalizing and gunning down Americans. The police are becoming a law unto themselves.
Terrence Crutcher was gunned down in September in Tulsa, Oklahoma, seen in videos walking away from police who had their guns drawn on him with his hands up. Just three days later, Keith Lamont Scott was gunned down by police in Charlotte, North Carolina. Police said he had a gun, but eyewitnesses said he did not and was merely sitting in his car reading a book while waiting for a school bus to drop off his child. In one week in July, 2016 five Latino men were killed by police. These wanton killings, which are disproportionately aimed at Blacks and other minorities, are increasingly spreading to broader sections of America, even to children. As of this writing, a Louisiana judge just released a police body cam showing officers firing multiple rounds into a car, killing a six-year old white child in 2015.
While the police and the ruling class they serve would like to see the growing protests against this inhumanity confined to one community, they are spreading everywhere. Athletes from amateur to professional are getting down on one knee during the playing of the national anthem in protest. When asked why he started protesting, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick said, “There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” The widespread anger of the people at the slaughter of human lives, and the questioning of the police themselves by many who have previously supported them, is very important. Underlying the anger is the demand of the people for a humane society.
We are witnessing the rise of a fascist police state that will brutalize anyone who stands in its way. It is aimed at the growing numbers of us that the economic system no longer has any need for, especially the youth. Capitalism can no longer provide jobs on the scale it once did. Automation is taking those jobs. The rulers are using the killings to polarize society politically based on race. At the same time, the poverty brought on by the economic crisis affects millions regardless of color, and so is pushing society toward polarizing based on class interests. The rulers’ goal is to prevent the workers from uniting as a class, yet we have no possibility of survival without uniting as a class to create a new society that is democratic, prosperous and free of police violence.
If the American people can get behind the ‘stop killing us’ motion and unite it with a vision of a whole new society our cause will take on real force. Time is short and the future depends on us.
