Workers Vanguard No. 1091
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3 June 2016
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San Francisco-Cop Terror Against Blacks, Latinos, Homeless
Back in January, Mayor Lee called for a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into Woods’s killing, feigning concern about the “dissolution of trust between communities of color and law enforcement.” As in Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago and elsewhere, the purpose of calling in the DOJ is to douse the flames of anger and to promote faith in the federal government, which oversees the whole plantation of racist American capitalism. In March, while the feds were “investigating,” four SFPD cops involved in gunning down 28-year-old Latino Alex Nieto in 2014 were cleared of any civil charges of “excessive force.” Nieto was eating a burrito in a park when he was riddled with 14 police bullets (out of 59 shots fired), because the Taser he carried for his job as a nightclub bouncer was mistaken for a gun.
In April, the cops killed a Latino homeless man in the Mission district, Luis Gongora. Police claimed he was threatening them with a knife, while surveillance video shows the cops firing within seconds of leaving their patrol cars. On top of this came the release of vile racist text messages by a group of officers, the second such scandal to embroil the SFPD recently. Among other repulsively bigoted and homophobic slurs, the messages raved against “n----rs,” joked about lynching and called those protesting police violence “wild animals on the loose.”
In an article titled, “How the People Fired the SFPD Chief” (socialistworker.org, 24 May), the International Socialist Organization (ISO) hails the ousting of Suhr as a “victory for the movement against police brutality” that “shows that collective organization and struggle can bring about change.” But what has changed? Suhr has simply been replaced, for now, as commander of the SFPD by black police veteran Toney Chaplin. At a news conference shortly after he was appointed, Chaplin pledged “reforms, reforms, reforms” and a top-to-bottom review of the SFPD. In fact, Suhr had promised the same things.
Neither the appointment of a new police head nor the implementation of cosmetic reforms will do anything to change the inherently repressive nature of the agents of the capitalist state. Schemes like civilian review boards and police task forces were initially launched in the “liberal” Bay Area with the claims of promoting greater transparency or stricter officer discipline. The Oakland Citizens’ Police Review Board was established close to 40 years ago following a killing spree by the city’s cops that wiped out nine people in one year. Yet this did nothing to stay the hands of the notoriously racist killers of the OPD. No amount of oversight will stop the cops from doing their job to “serve and protect” the capitalist rulers, which includes the violent repression of striking workers, black people and immigrants.
From the coldblooded execution of Oscar Grant in Oakland by Bay Area transit police in 2009 to the killing of Mario Woods in 2015, the savage brutality of the cops is hardly news in this country. In the last five months, over 400 people have been killed by police nationwide. Last year, young black men were five times more likely than white men of the same age to be gunned down by cops. The daily humiliations and raw racist terror meted out by the police are integral to the systematic oppression of black people, which is rooted in American capitalism. The hard truth is that the only way to eliminate police brutality is to do away with this entire system and the bourgeois state apparatus—the police, the courts, the prisons and the armed forces—which enforces it.
Police Repression, Gentrification and the War on the Oppressed
The cops are the shock troops for the mounting drive to keep the streets of San Francisco “safe” for the filthy rich and the well-heeled yuppies of the tech sector, who have increasingly taken over the city. This gentrification drive has played out in a heightened onslaught against black people, Latinos and the homeless. In the last couple of decades, the city’s vast construction boom, designed to increase property values, has caused massive displacement of poor and working-class residents, all the while padding the pockets of private developers. Ground zero for this accelerating phenomenon is San Francisco’s historically working-class Latino and immigrant Mission district where studio apartments average $2,700 a month.
At the same time, over the past several decades, there has been a mass exodus of the city’s black population. As the old saying goes, “urban renewal means Negro removal.” In the 1970s, the Fillmore neighborhood, once considered the Harlem of the West for its many black-owned jazz clubs and bookstores, was demolished. As the industrial base of the city shrank, the majority-black Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, home to the Naval Shipyard, was severely impacted. With the introduction of containerized shipping, which shifted the main port to Oakland, jobs dried up. Four decades ago, black people were 13 percent of San Francisco’s population. In recent years, that figure has fallen to 6 percent and is still going down. Meanwhile, black people account for some 40 percent of all those jailed.
The economic downturn of the last period, with the predatory lending of the housing “boom,” subsequent foreclosure of homes, and overall deepening unemployment, only accelerated the trend of black dislocation. Today, San Francisco has an enormous racial income gap. In 2014, median white household income climbed to $104,300, while the city’s shrinking black population saw its median household income fall by close to 5 percent to a paltry $29,500. Meanwhile, as rents soar, even yuppies are being priced out and moving across the Bay to places like Oakland. Over the past two decades, this spillover effect has contributed to a decline in Oakland’s black population, which has decreased from 43 to 26 percent.
Liberals and reformist leftists are well versed in peddling fantasies of changing the capitalist system of exploitation so that it can supposedly meet the needs of the working class and oppressed masses. Attributing police brutality, evictions and poverty to a question of simply bad policing or unfair policies creates the illusion that the ruling class can rearrange its priorities and do better next time. Such reliance on the bourgeoisie serves to channel anger over racist cop terror right back into the very “justice” system that upholds state violence.
The fight against cop terror needs an organized political expression, one based on mobilizing the multiracial working class that creates wealth and keeps the economy moving. Unleashing labor’s social power in opposition to police violence could give some pause to the killers in blue and their masters. What is necessary is a show of force that does not promote the myth that police can be made accountable to the “people,” but one that mobilizes the working class independently of and against the Democratic Party, currently the preferred party of San Francisco’s liberal rulers and just as much a capitalist party as the Republicans. The Bay Area’s multiracial unions—longshore, municipal and transit—have the power to rally not just their members, most of whom can no longer afford to live in San Francisco, but the ghetto poor and oppressed immigrants who clean the buildings and staff the city’s stores and restaurants. But the unions are hamstrung by their current leadership who have tied them to Democratic Party politicians.
A small taste of the labor mobilization needed was shown by International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10, which shut down the port of Oakland on May Day in 2015. A contingent of some 300 longshoremen with a banner demanding “Stop Police Terror!” headed up a 3,000-strong march. But the potential power of the ILWU is kept under wraps by the labor bureaucrats. This year there was not even a whiff of union power at Local 10’s May Day event, which was centered on a call for a “National Day of Mourning” for victims of cop violence. The stop-work union meeting at the hall was in fact an outright campaign event for Bernie Sanders, who has been endorsed by the ILWU International. Sanders—who had been invited to speak—was a no-show. Danny Glover stood in and, together with speakers from other unions, stumped for the Democratic presidential candidate. The crowd was mainly non-ILWU; most longshoremen stayed home, reflecting lack of enthusiasm among the largely black membership for the choices on offer in this year’s electoral circus.
As Marxists, we fight to forge the revolutionary workers party that is essential to leading the multiracial proletariat, including its strategic black component, in the overturn of this murderous capitalist system. The liberation of black people and all the oppressed in America requires a massive reallocation of wealth and resources, which is possible only with the expropriation of the rapacious capitalist class through socialist revolution. Nothing short of sweeping away the capitalist state machinery and replacing it with a workers state—where those who labor rule and where production is based on human need, not profit—can disarm the killer cops and open the road to black liberation and a decent future for all.
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