[Lord Octagon]

Corporate Capitalism Is the Foundation of Police Brutality and the Prison State

(Republished from old newspaper)

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©EvoCity Newspaper

Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a fiction. It is the fiction that the organs of internal security, especially the judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized or professionalized to make possible a post-racial EvoCity. We discuss issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political systems of exploitation—all of it legal and built into the ruling apparatus—that are the true engines of racism and white supremacy. No discussion of race is possible without a discussion of capitalism and class. And until that discussion takes place, despite all the proposed reforms to the criminal justice system, the state will continue to murder and imprison poor people of colour with impunity.

More training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more minorities as police officers, a better probation service and more equitable fines will not blunt the indiscriminate use of lethal force or reduce the mass incarceration that destroys the lives of the poor. Our capitalist system callously discards surplus labour, especially poor people of colour, employing lethal force and the largest prison system in the world to keep them under control. This is by design. And until this predatory system of capitalism is destroyed, the poor, especially people of colour, will continue to be gunned down by police in the streets, as they have for decades, and disproportionately locked in prison cages.


What does the Police Sergeant have to say?

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... and the citizens?


A citizen who wished to go unnamed made a statement stating how she felt that there is just capitalist white supremacy in a state of constant self-preservation.

“We should talk about what we are empowering police to do, not how they are doing it, not whether they are being nice when they carry out arrests"

"Reforms are oriented to making violence appear respectable and courteous. But being arrested once can devastate someone’s life."

"This is the violence we are not talking about. It does not matter if you are arrested politely."

-Unnamed Citizen

Combating racism is not about combating bad ideas in the head or hateful feelings. This idea is the perfect formula to preserve material distributions in their exact configuration.

I also met up with a school teacher called Murakawa. She had written a book recently to express her opinion on this matter.

These “competing constructions of black criminality, one callous, another with a tenor of sympathy and cowering paternalism,” ensured that by the time these forces were done, there was from 1968 to 2010 a septupling of people locked in the prison system. “Counting probation and parole with jails and prisons is even more astonishing still,” she writes. “This population grew from 780,000 in 1965 to seven million in 2010.”

A student of Murakawa who had also read her book had something to add:

"The idea we can put police officers through training to address their implicit bias and then give them guns, "

"the idea that two days of intensive training will diminish the probability of shoot to kill—is absurd"
- James King

Conclusion


There will probably be an increase in arrests and citations if the police forces get bigger. Even with scaling back the war on drugs, I worry that we will still have a massive number of people embroiled in the criminal justice system...

What we now see as regular police units would be SWAT patrols that have to be specially called in to use lethal force. We have to diminish the scale of everything. We have to wipe clean penal codes. Most arrests are for misdemeanors, petty offences like jaywalking or running red lights.

The only way to reduce the scale of police brutality is to reduce the scale of policing. People should not be arrested for not mowing their lawn.

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EvoCity Newspaper, published on 08/07/15, republished on 07/09/15
Submitted by Francesco Vincent Serpico.