A View From The Left -Sandra Bland’s Death-The Police Are Guilty

Workers Vanguard No. 1072	7 August 2015

Sandra Bland’s Death-The Police Are Guilty

 

On July 13, the lifeless body of 28-year-old Sandra Bland was found hanging in a county jail cell in the town of Hempstead on the edge of East Texas. A Chicago native, Bland was political and outspoken, a black activist who wanted to end police terror and racism. Three days earlier, a Texas state trooper had pulled her over for not signaling a lane change. When she was less than cheerful and refused to put out her cigarette, the cop took her for “uppity.” Dashboard video captured him drawing his Taser, threatening, “I will light you up,” shortly before he forced Bland out of her car and off camera slammed her to the ground. She was then charged with assaulting a police officer.

Bland was stopped on the road to historically black Prairie View A&M University, her alma mater, founded during Reconstruction on the site of a former slave plantation. Cops make it their daily routine to patrol that road—part of an effort to keep black students, faculty and campus workers “in their place.” As recently as 2003, the local district attorney threatened to prosecute Prairie View students if they tried to vote, and in the ensuing years they have had to continue to battle local officials in the courts over exercising that right.

The official version of how Bland died in her Waller County jail cell is the dubious story that she committed suicide. Her family, friends and many activists have insisted that she would not have hurt herself and suspect foul play. Whatever the exact circumstances of her death, the police are guilty as hell. And Bland is hardly the only one. Last month, six black women were found dead in jails across the country, while some 4,200 people have died in Texas alone over the past decade during attempted arrests or once behind bars.

What happened to Bland is an all too familiar story in the states of the former Confederacy. Indeed, on the streets of the U.S., North and South, whether isolated backwaters or cosmopolitan centers, stopping, beating and shooting black men and women for “driving while black” is standard police procedure. A scant six days after Bland died, 43-year-old Samuel DuBose was blown away by a University of Cincinnati cop who stopped him because his front license plate was missing. The Washington Post has tallied over 570 fatal police shootings nationwide already this year (more than the FBI, which nominally tracks the statistic, has reported for every year since 1976). Black people were killed at three times the rate of whites.

At protests sparked by these killings, many ask: why does it keep happening? Black people in the U.S. constitute an oppressed race-color caste, stigmatized for the color of their skin regardless of class. The main enforcers of this social order are the cops, the thugs in blue at the core of the repressive state machinery by which one class, the ruling capitalists, holds down another, the workers. Cop terror against black people—whether down and out or up and coming—is not an “excess”; it’s a calculated program. It is the way U.S. capitalism, which is built on the bedrock of black oppression, resolves the contradiction between the assertion of some formal equal rights and the forcible segregation of the bulk of the black population at the bottom of society. Black oppression serves the capitalist rulers by keeping working people from uniting against the class enemy.

The racist killers were doing what they are hired, trained and paid to do, something that no amount of reform will change, including the “community involvement and oversight strategies” demanded by the Black Lives Matter movement. Waller County itself shows what “community control” of the cops looks like in Texas. As chief of police in Hempstead, Glenn Smith was so blatantly racist even by local standards that he got fired in 2008. He ran for sheriff later that year and was elected by a landslide. Smith is now in charge of the investigation of Bland’s death in the jail he oversees. But even where blacks are the majority, as in Baltimore, a city long run by black Democrats, “community control” and myriad other schemes to reform the police have proved to be the hoaxes that they are. The “rough ride” in a police van that broke Freddie Gray’s neck following his arrest by a gang of black and white cops is a chilling illustration.

Black Lives Matter also begs the federal Department of Justice to withhold funds from local police departments until discriminatory policing is ended. But as the saying goes, “The fish stinks from the head.” The federal government enforces the racist “war on drugs,” runs prisons and oversees the entire rotten system that the cops “serve and protect.” Attorney General Loretta Lynch might launch an investigation into Bland’s death because, in her words, “the black community is not handled with the same professionalism and courtesy” that other people get from the cops. How obscene! Black people are run roughshod over by a system that increasingly deems them an expendable population. And Lynch is its top cop. The role of the black Democrats is to channel the anger and frustration of the black masses back into prayer meetings and more schemes to “reform” the killers in uniform.

The aftermath of DuBose’s killing has reinforced illusions in the possibility of holding cops “accountable.” That coldblooded shooting was captured on the body camera worn by the cop, who now faces charges of voluntary manslaughter and murder. But truth is, from Rodney King to Eric Garner no video has saved anyone from the cop perpetrators of racist terror. On a rare occasion, a cop might face charges or even more rarely receive some punishment, usually a slap on the wrist, all for the purpose of heading off any potential unrest and refurbishing the image of the police in order to make it easier for them to go about their business of repression. Simply put, the capitalist state apparatus cannot be made to act on behalf of the workers and the oppressed.

There is a way out: the road of integrated class struggle that combats every manifestation of oppression and leads to workers revolution. The anger of black people must be linked to the social power of the multiracial working class mobilized in opposition to the capitalist state and all its political parties, not least the Democrats. The Confederate flag has come down from a pole in South Carolina, but it will take a socialist revolution to uproot the social and material basis of black oppression, the American capitalist system. The Spartacist League raises the demands: Finish the Civil War! For a workers America! For black liberation through socialist revolution!