the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 26, 2015
When U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch called a summit of mayors, police chiefs, and prosecutors to discuss the rise in violent crime in cities across the country, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel said, “We have allowed our police department to get fetal, and it is having a direct consequence. They have pulled back from the ability to interdict ... they don’t want to be a news story themselves....”
Most of the mayors in attendance applauded. The St. Louis mayor blames violent crime on the “Ferguson effect”, that cops don’t want to be the next Darren Wilson, the cop who killed Michael Brown. We hear the same line in Baltimore and New York. According to this logic, revealing what cops ACTUALLY DO by taking videos amounts to a “war on cops!”
This argument flies in the face of logic. First of all, NOT ONE COP has yet been convicted of murder or manslaughter, despite all the cases that have been caught on video. Very few have even lost a day’s pay, even when there is video evidence that they killed someone!
On top of that, the police have all kinds of ways of massaging the violent crime statistics. It’s true there is lots of crime in U.S. cities this year–and there was last year, too. Why should we believe people who have a political reason to make it seem like crime has gone up?
No, hypocrites like Rahm Emanuel and police departments across the country don’t care about crime in poor neighborhoods. They just want to use crime as an excuse to ramp up their control and repression of exactly those people most likely to be the victims of crimes–both the crimes of the street and the crimes of the cops.