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Police are the Enemy Within

Yates, Michael
http://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/12/police-are-the-enemy-within/

Publisher:  CounterPunch
Date Written:  12/06/2020
Year Published:  2020  
Resource Type:  Article

Yates argues that the police are the enemy of the working class, and that "law enforcement" has a long history of violence against Black and Indigenous individuals and communities. Moreover, in the capitalist system where the law is biased in favour of property over persons, the role of the police continues to be the protection of business from damage, and that harm to persons is simply collateral damage.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

We say, “Law Enforcement.” What does that mean? A look at history tells us that the laws have always had extreme bias built into them. In the United States, the Constitution itself, embraced slavery. So, enforcing the law meant enforcing slavery. On the ground, applying the law meant it was fine to beat and torture human beings, because the law considered them property, to be done with as the slaveowner saw fit. If slaves escaped, public and private “police” were free to capture them, even kill them if necessary, though it was expected that property be returned intact (and the owner might punish or kill the slave catcher failed to do so). After the Civil War, there was a brief period of federal government protection of former slaves, but this ended in 1877, and there followed a century of legally sanctioned violence, including innumerable lynchings of black men and women. There also followed mass incarceration, with prisoners farmed out to businesses in what amounted to a new form of slavery, one that continues today with the incredible rise in imprisonment of black persons, what Michelle Alexander calls the “New Jim Crow.”

The last paragraph could be rewritten with Indigenous Peoples or Mexican Americans substituted for Black Americans. They have been continuous victims of police violence. American Indians were slaughtered by the US Army and are today routinely subjected to police barbarity. Throughout the Southwest, Mexican Americans were hanged by mobs and otherwise treated with extreme cruelty, without recourse to police protection. Today, the US government is holding Hispanic immigrant children in concentration camps.

The law is also biased in favor of property over persons. Ownership of businesses, buildings, machinery, and so forth enjoys all manner of legal protection, exactly what we would expect in a capitalist system. Urban police forces were originally established to quell disturbances by city workers protesting working conditions and merchants raising prices of bread and other essential products above their traditional levels. Similarly, national guards and their ubiquitous armories were put in place or greatly expanded in response to the great labor uprising in 1877. Their job was (and is) to protect business property from damage. Harm to people is simply collateral damage, the fault of those who had the temerity tot rise up in the first place.

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