Trump Regime to Cops Everywhere: “Take Off the Gloves!”
January 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Within hours of assuming power, Trump and his regime moved rapidly to implement their new reality. Trump issued an Executive Order telling federal agencies to stop issuing any new regulations, and to stall on implementing any penalties on states or individuals—his first steps in doing away with “Obamacare.” He followed that by declaring a “National Day of Patriotism.”
At the same time, the www.Whitehouse.gov website was radically transformed to make clear what will be this country’s most important objectives—and what will not. Under Obama there was a section of the website on the danger of global warming, to give the appearance that his administration was doing something substantial about it. The entire section on climate change has now DISAPPEARED; in fact, there is no mention whatsoever of climate change on the site. Also missing is any reference to protecting LGBT rights or civil rights. The second most spoken language in the U.S.—Spanish—was erased from the official page of the website. What IS there is an outline of the crude “America First” proclamation that was Trump’s first speech.
Trump’s Solution to the “Problem” of Police Murder—Stop Investigating It
Less publicized that same day was an ominous action taken by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the U.S. District Court in Baltimore. The DOJ under Trump requested, and was granted, a temporary delay in moving to implement a consent decree, an agreement reached with the City of Baltimore requiring the Baltimore police department (BPD) to stop the most blatant of their repeated abuses against the Black and Latino people and others in the inner city. That consent decree is the result of a DOJ investigation stemming from the cold-blooded murder of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in April 2015.
Freddie Gray
Freddie Gray was chased, beaten down, and hog-tied. Then the cops dragged him to a police van and drove him around on a “rough ride” until he was dead. Thousands responded by pouring into the streets for days of protest, resistance, and righteous rebellion. In order to quell this uprising—“before the entire city became an armed camp or was burned to the ground”—charges were brought against six cops.
All the pigs walked. Within days the DOJ announced the results of their investigation of the BPD. The principal purpose of investigations like this one is to keep the anger of the masses tamped down, by creating the illusion that some change in police practices will come. Obama’s Justice Department utilized these investigations of police departments repeatedly—following the murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Laquan McDonald in Chicago, and more. What all these investigations have revealed is the ugly underbelly—the actual “patterns and practices”—of violent, repressive police forces everywhere, creating a situation where the people in the inner cities are terrorized by cops who systematically and illegally degrade and brutalize them—wantonly, and with impunity, almost never being held to account.
The stories that accompany the report on Baltimore are as vile as they are typical of police forces across this country. Cops, afraid of retribution from their fellow cops, don’t report it when they see them planting drugs on “suspects”; one cop reported being reprimanded by his superior when he did try to report. A cop who witnessed another cop shoot a man in the groin who was already down and helpless said he was silenced by threats from other police. And their treatment of women would make Trump drool. A woman who was stopped by police for a missing headlight was ordered to get out of the car, strip, and stand on the sidewalk to be strip-searched! She asked, “I really gotta take all my clothes off?” “Yeah,” said the supervising male cop, who ordered a female officer to not just do a strip search, but search the anal cavity, in full view of the street! No weapon or contraband was found, and the woman was released with a repair order for the headlight.
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These practices are so typical that one sergeant, while being observed by a DOJ investigator, told a cop to “Make something up” when the cop couldn’t find a reason to go after a group of youth on the street. These are just a few examples—from just one city—of why police are, accurately, referred to as pigs.
Trump: “The dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong. The Trump Administration will end it.”
The “new” Justice Department’s decision to hold back, and possibly push aside the results of the investigation into the Baltimore police department is a glimpse of what’s to come under Trump’s fascist law-and-order regime. In his confirmation hearing, Jeff Sessions, soon to be installed as U.S. Attorney General, told the Senate committee why he opposes such DOJ investigations: “I think there is concern that good police officers and good departments can be sued by the Department of Justice when you just have individuals within a department that have done wrong. These lawsuits undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness, and we need to be careful before we do that.”
Under the direction of this unreconstructed racist and anti-immigrant bigot, any minimal restraints that these pigs may have felt, coming from those whose system they serve, are going to be fully removed.
“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
There is a whole section of the Trump White House website dedicated to “Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community.” It ends with a threat to anyone who would dare to challenge this full unleashing of the killers in blue: “A Trump Administration will empower our law enforcement officers to do their jobs and keep our streets free of crime and violence... The dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong. The Trump Administration will end it.” [our emphasis]
From now on the “gloves are off” the thugs with guns and badges across the country, sanctioned from the very top. That is what “Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community” will look like down on the ground. If the Trump-Pence juggernaut is able to consolidate its rule, an even greater horror will be unleashed on the masses of Black, Latino and other oppressed people in the inner core of this country’s cities. This cannot be allowed to happen. NO! This fascist regime must not be normalized—they must be ousted from power!
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