Category: Racism

NYC Police Killings and the Haymarket Massacre: Lessons for the Movement

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

In every vibrant progressive social movement there comes a moment when a psychologically or emotionally disturbed person, an agent provocateur, or a political extremist commits an atrocious act that is seized upon by the State and/or the political Right as a means of attempting to discredit or outright repress the movement.  The action, committed for whatever reason, is sufficiently heinous that confusion develops within the movement and the movement can lose both its momentum as well as a segment of its less committed or more ambivalent supporters.

In 1886, at the height of the Eight Hour Day movement, a bomb was set off at a worker’s rally at Haymarket Square in Chicago.  The rally was called to both protest police killings of worker protesters as well as to support striking workers fighting for the 8 hour day.  The rally was attacked by the police and a bomb was thrown at the police.  To this day no one actually knows who set off the bomb, including whether it was an agent provocateur, or a deranged or infuriated activist.  What is known, however, is that the bombing became a pretext for governmental effort to discredit the protests and the workers movement, and to suggest that the entire movement was led by cold, cruel anarchists who were only interested in violence.  Charges were brought against key leaders of the movement and in a kangaroo trial, eight individuals were convicted for their alleged involvement in the bombing and four were subsequently hanged.

The reaction by police unions, the political Right and much of the mainstream media today, in the aftermath of Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s alleged killings of two NYPD officers, is eerily reminiscent of the aftermath of the Haymarket massacre.  Intense and manipulative efforts are underway to paint those who have protested police violence, or even those who have simply spoken up against it, as allegedly having blood on their hands since they supposedly created the tension between the police and the community.  New York City Mayor de Blasio, for instance, has been demonized by the Right, with the suggestion that he and Rev. Al Sharpton created the incendiary environment that resulted in the murders of the two officers.

In this moment it is critical that progressives counter these arguments actively, vocally and with immense vigor.  These arguments and allegations are cynical and disingenuous efforts to discredit and derail one of the most important movements of the recent past.  Let us be clear as to what has been unfolding.

An apparently mentally and/or emotionally disturbed career criminal allegedly carried out the attempted murder of his girlfriend followed by the murder of the two officers.  This individual had no connection with any social justice movement, had no apparent connections with New York and was certainly not a leader of the movement against police violence.

Second, the tension that exists between the police and communities of color was not manufactured by any one.  It was and is the result of YEARS of police lynchings carried out in African American and Latino communities. 

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How Runaway Economic Inequality and Racism Are Linked to Police Killings

 

By Les Leopold
Alternet


Dec 15, 2014 – Why are white cops shooting unarmed black men?

On one level the story is simple: racism. Too many police officers fear people of color in the neighborhoods they patrol, and are likely to over-react with force during encounters. The local courts also engage in discrimination by failing to indict the killers, even when captured on video, as in the brutal police slaying of Eric Garner in Staten Island, NY. Both the policing and the court system obviously reflect the polarization of our communities, and our inability to escape the legacy of slavery, more than 150 years after emancipation.

But racism only accounts for part of the story. We also must understand how judicial racism and even police violence are deeply connected to the financialization of the economy and runaway inequality.

It is not by accident that America has become both the most unequal developed nation in the world, and the nation with the largest prison population. We’re number one in police killings, incarceration and inequality—not Russia, not China. Our national self-image so steeped in the idea of freedom has not caught up with these ugly realities.

Racism is has been with us for centuries, but something very new happened in America around 1980 that set the stage for these police killings. Something very big is transforming us into the first democratic police state in human history.

Incarceration Nation

Please look carefully at the chart below, and consider the history of American racism, violence and protest.

From 1920 to around 1980, the American prison population held steady, even as our population grew rapidly. One could easily argue that racism was much more virulent during this period, especially in the Jim Crow South, from the hundreds of lynchings in the 1920s to violent repression of civil rights activists in the 1950s and ’60s. So unless you believe that racism changed for the worse since 1980, then it alone can not possibly account for the explosive rise of the prison population.

Even during the turbulent 1960s with its many demonstrations, and violent inner-city upheavals, the prison population hardly budged. Similarly, Nixon’s infamous war on drugs, launched in June 1971, also did not boost the prison population during the 1970s.

Then something major changed to send the prison population soaring. What happened?

The explosive rise of the American prison population

Most explanations focus on complexities of the shift to mandatory sentencing. Judges were compelled by harsh new sentencing laws to jail even those convicted of minor crimes, and to hand out sentences much longer than appropriate to the infraction. Because of urban housing segregation by race and income, lower income neighborhoods experienced higher crime rates, made even higher by the futile enforcement of drug prohibition. As the police enforcement increased, a disproportionate number of people of color were funneled into prison. Although non-Hispanic blacks form only 13.6 of the U.S. population, they are 39.4 percent of the prison population [3]. The prison population further swelled with bigger backlogs in under-funded courts, bail that cannot be met, and inadequate legal services for the poor.

But the gargantuan climb in our prison population also corresponds with the dramatic rise in inequality. (The chart below compares the incomes of the top 1 percent with the bottom 90%. Note how the gap rises virtually in lockstep with the rise in our prison population.) This uncanny correspondence suggests that we must consider other explanations that explore the links between runaway inequality and runaway incarceration.

The Financialization of the Economy and the Destruction of Good-Paying Industrial Jobs

America adopted draconian conservative economic policies starting in the late 1970s with the advent of the Better Business Climate model. The idea was to cut taxes on the rich and deregulate business, especially Wall Street. That combination was supposed to put money in the hands of the few, who would then heavily invest it in our economy, thereby creating an enormous economic boom. Good jobs and rising incomes for all those willing to work would soon follow. It didn’t happen. Instead these Better Business Climate policies led to runaway inequality, the destruction of middle-income jobs, and wage-stagnation for the vast majority of working people.

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Organizers Who Met With Obama See Meeting as Affirmation That Movement Against Police Violence is Working

By Kevin Gosztola
FireDogLake

Dec 2, 2014 – President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Attorney General Eric Holder met with seven black and Latino organizers yesterday to discuss police violence in not just Ferguson, Missouri, but throughout the country. Following the meeting, Obama announced some steps his administration would be taking to address some of the issues raised. Organizers who participated in the meeting responded to the announced steps.

Obama announced there would be a task force that will “reach out and listen to law enforcement and community activists and other stakeholders.” After 90 days, a report with “concrete recommendations, including best practices for communities where law enforcement and neighborhoods are working well together” will be provided to Obama.

An executive order regulating the 1033 program, the federal program where military equipment is provided to police departments, will be issued. Obama will also be proposing “new community policing initiatives,” particularly providing “up to 50,000 additional body-worn cameras for law enforcement.”

Ashley Yates of Millennial Activists United (MAU), who met with Obama, addressed the proposed measures on a press conference call. The body cams, she noted, would not necessarily save black lives from police brutality or from being denied justice. In the case of the young black man, John Crawford, there was surveillance video of a cop gunning him down as he held an unloaded air rifle in the middle of a Walmart. Authorities still refused to indict the officer. It is possible this happens again in the cases of Tamir Rice and Eric Garner, whose deaths at the hands of police were also captured on video.

The movement, according to Yates, is for the abolition of the 1033 program. “It is a form of psychological torture to walk down your street and see Humvees posted on the corner. I do not see a need for those in our city,” she stated. She could not believe that these “checks and balances” on the 1033 program had not been issued yet.

Yates also said that there must be youth voices and black people who are activists in the room when the task force meets with individuals to develop their report. “You have to allow space for the people who are affected by the militarization, by police brutality, to define their oppression so we can actually frame the problem correctly.”

T-Dubb-O, a St. Louis hip-hop artist who was part of the group that met with the president, suggested, “He’s the first African-American president of the United States.” Obama should make this “his own issue and have a speech about it. Come out and open his mouth and use the power and influence that he has in that seat. Tell the rest of America that there is an issue. He’s experienced the same issue that we’re facing today. There is an issue.”

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