Moronic, Insulting and Vicious Advice from Dallas Police Chief, Bill & Hillary Clinton:
End Oppression... By Becoming a Murdering Oppressor!
August 1, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Thousands of youths and others are righteously rising up against one gruesome videotaped police murder after another and America's virulent, endemic persecution of Black and other oppressed peoples. On July 11, in the wake of the police murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and the July 7 shooting of police in Dallas, Dallas Police Chief David Brown told anti-police terror and Black Lives Matter protesters:
Don't be a part of the problem. We're hiring. Get off that protest line and put an application in. And we'll put you in your neighborhood, and we will help you resolve some of the problems you're protesting about.
Now this call to work with, even join the police, has been echoed from the ruling system's highest levels. At the Democratic National Convention, former President Bill Clinton told "disillusioned and afraid" Black youths to join the police to build a future "where nobody is afraid to walk outside." Two days later, in accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton hailed those who had followed Brown's advice and applied to become cops, because this is will make America "better and stronger."
Protesters part of the problem? The police part of the solution? What world are these people talking about!?
Here's the reality: The problem is that this system is carrying out a slow genocide against Black people, through epidemic and voluminously documented levels of mass incarceration, terror, and murder by police, and daily racism, abuse, and deprivation. The cops are the front-line enforcers of all these horrors. They use constant spirit-breaking harassment and humiliating abuse, casual brutality, and outright murder to do that enforcement.
Is it going to change things if more people—Black people in particular—work with or become cops? Reality has already shown the answer: a resounding NO!
Today 20 out of 68 police chiefs in major U.S. cities are Black. Chief Brown is one. Has having Black police, Black chiefs of police, or even a Black commander in chief stopped police murder and terror? No! There are five times more people in prison now than during the 1970s (when Black cops and police chiefs were rare), and the police are still shooting down more than 1,000 people a year, disproportionately unarmed Black and Brown people.
Bob Avakian: Police murder... and the murderous logic of this system's election game.
Take Baltimore, where 53 percent of the police force is Black, and many top police and government officials are Black. Did having a mainly Black police force stop police murder? No, Freddie Gray was murdered by the Baltimore police, including by torturing him with a "rough ride" in a police van. Okay, but did the "good" Black cops denounce the murder? No—they carried it out! Half the pigs who murdered Freddie Gray were Black. Did Black cops testify against those in their ranks who murdered Freddie Gray? No, not one. After Freddie Gray was murdered, all the killer cops, Black and white, got their stories together, lied together when they went to court, were backed up by the entire police force, and were then let off scot free. (See "All Charges Dropped Against Pigs Who Murdered Freddie Gray—A Prosecutor's Revelations... a SYSTEM of IN-Justice.")
What about Chicago, where police have long been notorious for torture and executions? Today, one in four Chicago cops are Black, and Chicago pigs are still notorious for brutal torture and outright executions.
The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:24
Has having a Black police chief stopped police brutality and murder in Dallas? Ask Hilari Younger, who told the New York Times, "The police look for every little reason to stop you." Ask Collette Flanagan, whose unarmed son Clinton Allen was murdered by Dallas police in 2013. Then the cop who murdered Clinton Allen was backed up and exonerated by Chief David Brown and his department.
Why hasn't integrating the police changed anything? Because, as Bob Avakian, the leader of the revolution, has analyzed, the job of the police is to protect and serve America's capitalist system of exploitation and oppression—not the people.
White supremacy was built into the foundations of American capitalism, and it's been a cornerstone of that system ever since. From slavery to Jim Crow to today, the position of Black people in this society has always been determined by the needs and workings of U.S. capitalism-imperialism at any given point in its history. That's why two massive upheavals—the Civil War, which ended slavery, and the Black Liberation struggle of the 1960s—couldn't uproot white supremacy. Today, when capitalism no longer has a way to profitably exploit millions of Black and other oppressed nationality masses, white supremacy is being enforced through the new Jim Crow: mass incarceration; locking people down in concentration camp-like conditions in ghettos, barrios, and rotting out rural areas; and police surveillance, harassment, abuse, brutality, and murder.
The brutal, murderous role of the police in all this isn't changed by the race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation of the police force carrying it out. So if you become a cop, you wouldn't change the police force. You'll become what they are—a pig! You won't be part of the solution, you'll be part of the problem, no matter what your intentions were when you signed up.
This call for Black people and opponents of racism to join the police is a moronic and insulting lie that "shifted the burden of dismantling oppression from the shoulders of the oppressors to the shoulders of the oppressed," as liberal New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote of Bill Clinton's call.
It's sick, but not surprising that Brown and the Clintons, with their long history of supporting, shackling, and murdering Black people, would try to smear protest as part of the problem... because protest and resistance are a key part of the solution—overthrowing the whole rotten, racist system they represent. Resistance to the system's crimes should be stepped up and spread—and more and more connected with preparing to make an actual revolution at the soonest possible moment. This—not joining with the murderers—is the only way the horrors of mass incarceration, murder, and terror by police will be ended, and a much better world be brought into being.
So, fuck Chief David Brown, President Bill Clinton, and wannabe President Hillary Clinton!
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