The Police: Are they just doing their Job?
The TV and the papers portray them as the thin blue line defending “normal” people from the hordes of criminals waiting to rob us blind, rape, or murder us in our beds. The truth is, however, something entirely different.
The fact is that when anti-social crimes like burglary, street robbery, and so on are committed against working-class women and men, if you phone the police from a working-class neighborhood, often they will not show for hours. Black people and women who have been raped or suffer domestic violence in the home find the police incredibly unsympathetic. Many people believe this proves that the police should have more money or power. This conclusion is wrong, because it ignores the fact that the fundamentally main role of the police is not to prevent crime.
The real task of the police is primarily to defend the existing social order, and this means repressing resistance to capitalism and its effects. This is what their “law and order” really amounts to, and it is not in our interests. Therefore, they have to disguise this role.
The police need to get the trust of ordinary people, to ensure our day-to-day obedience and co-operation, and to get us to accept law-and-order policies: more power, more weapons, and more numbers. To do this, they need to con us into believing that without them crime would explode. The press and politicians back them in this lie. It is based on the idea that our communities would be incapable of policing themselves if they were allowed to.
Whom they really Police
The true role of the police goes much further than systematic harassment and reinforcing racism. It exposes itself most nakedly when the working class and oppressed organize together and fight back.
Against police harassment and their attacks on demos and pickets, we should not turn the other cheek. We need to organize disciplined defense capable of winning when the police attack. On demonstrations, stewarding should be geared to defense and organized enough to resist attack. On pickets – defense squads run by the workers – they need to be set up to stop the police utilizing scabs.
Against racist attacks, we need our own street patrols under the control of committees of local workers and the community. As well as preventing police harassment, these patrols could deal more effectively with anti-social crime than the police ever could.
Imagine if a movement supported by the mass of working people tried to change seriously the distribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. With whom would the police side? The answer is clear: The police are an arm of the state, and when it comes to the crunch, the state will always defend the interest of the bosses against the struggles of workers. The state is not neutral, and neither are the police. What they do on our demonstrations is nothing compared to what they would do if workers got anywhere near succeeding in a revolution and seizing the property of the bosses.
Before we can start building a socialist society, the police will have to be broken up and replaced by the armed self-defense of the population. The police are a real, everyday threat to our interests and an obstacle to our socialist goal. This is why we must strip them of their powers and fight for our right to self-defense.
REVOLUTION says:
- Abolish the police
- Strip the police of their weapons: no batons, CS gas, riot shields, guns, etc.
- For organized self-defense
- Workers and youth must safeguard their own communities!