On the FBI Head’s February 12 Speech:
We Don’t Need to Build Connections Between Murdering Pigs and Victims of Police Murder
WE NEED REVOLUTION TO OVERTURN THIS WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM!
February 23, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Many people who oppose police brutality and murder did a double-take when, on February 12, FBI head James B. Comey called on Americans to not “roll up our car windows” but be part of an “open and honest discussion” of the issues brought to a fore by–as he characterized it—“the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, the ongoing protests throughout the country, and the assassinations of NYPD Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos...”.
But there was NOTHING good or positive in this speech. At the very time when people need to step up the battle against police brutality and murder, and at a time when the vicious nature of this system is coming into view for many, this speech—which is actually being used as a model by many mouthpieces for the oppressors across the nation—is sheer poison. It was aimed at lulling people to sleep—people among those who catch the most hell every day under this system, and especially many middle class people who have been awakened to stand with them in the past months. It is aimed at making people think that the powers that be are listening, and “get it.”
That is a deadly illusion! What Comey and the powers-that-be he speaks for (and is an enforcer for) “get” is the need to put a lid on the struggle and derail it. In the tens of thousands who were in the streets, in the millions who have been awakened, to one degree or another, to the reality of an epidemic of police brutality and murder, they see a danger that things could spiral further out of control, that people in their millions will NOT believe that there is any hope in this system, and will fight harder and raise their heads to look for real solutions.
We Don’t Need to Build Connections Between Murdering Pigs and Victims of Police Murder
Ever since the uprising in Ferguson after the police murder of Michael Brown, the system has been facing a crisis. The anger that burst forth in Ferguson had been bubbling up for a long time, and when it busted out nationwide the powers-that-be couldn’t just rely on their main “argument”—armored personnel carriers, tear gas, rubber bullets, and jail. Comey’s speech was a well thought-out attempt to make people feel someone is listening, and in the process distort reality, twist the terms of things, and defuse the struggle.
Comey said, “Unfortunately, in places like Ferguson and New York City, and in some communities across this nation, there is a disconnect between police agencies and many citizens—predominantly in communities of color.”
“Disconnect!?!” Strangling people to death for nothing like they did to Eric Garner? Mowing down people who are running away because they are accused of throwing rocks like they did to Antonio Zambrano-Montes?! Killing young children for playing with toy guns like they did to Tamir Rice?!? All these examples (which are very recent) are on one level only the sharpest concentration points of what goes on day-in, day-out, across the country. That is some goddamn “disconnect”!
This bullshit about a “disconnect” between police and oppressed people covers up the real situation. Police are murdering Black and brown people, getting away with it every day, instituting a reign of terror, and funneling those inner city youth they don’t kill into the genocidal prison system.
That “connection” doesn’t need to be strengthened through dialogue, through listening more carefully to each other, or anything else. It needs to be STOPPED! — NOW!
Spare Us the Officer Friendly Bullshit
A big theme of Comey’s speech was that the people who benefit most from this system’s police are poor and oppressed people. He claimed: “When you dial 911, whether you are white or Black, the cops come, and they come quickly, and they come quickly whether they are white or Black. That’s what cops do, in addition to all of the other hard and difficult and dangerous and frightening things that they do. They respond to homes in the middle of the night where a drunken father, wielding a gun, is threatening his wife and children. They pound up the back stairs of an apartment building, not knowing whether the guys behind the door they are about to enter are armed, or high, or both.”
What about Tamir Rice? On November 22, 2014, someone called 911 in Cleveland to report a child playing with a gun that was “probably fake” on a playground. Police rolled up and murdered Tamir Rice within two seconds of arriving on the scene. And nobody—including the U.S. IN-Justice Department or the FBI has arrested anyone for this murder.
What about Tyisha Miller? Friends found Tyisha Miller on December 28, 1998, unconscious, locked in her car with a handgun on her lap. They couldn’t wake her up. When they called 911, police came, broke out the window next to Tyisha’s face, and immediately opened fire. The police put 12 bullets in Tyisha’s back. Before, during and after the shooting, they were heard to make racist statements and cop-jokes.
And when pigs “pound up the back stairs of an apartment building...” they do so like U.S. troops in Iraq or Afghanistan—looking at anyone who breathes as the enemy. Like when an NYPD cop shot and killed Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old African American man for simply walking down the stairway of his apartment building in Brooklyn on November 20, 2014.
Who Comey Calls—And WHY?
A pivotal moment in Comey’s speech was when he said: “One of the hardest things I do as FBI Drector is call the chiefs and sheriffs in departments around the nation when officers have been killed in the line of duty.”
This is in line with the massive dose of lies and confusion put out, from the halls of power to the mass media—particularly after two NYC cops were killed on December 20—that the problem in America is people are killing police, not the other way around. That being a cop is a dangerous job where heroic people sacrifice their lives to protect everyone.
Last year, according to statistics compiled by the pro-police National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund, 27 police were killed as a result of “felonious acts” in 2013. Their same report found that “firearms-related fatalities [against police] reached a 126-year low.” And last year, 461 people were killed by police—numbers that are widely recognized to be under-reported as such reports are voluntary for local police forces.
The loved ones of victims of police killings don’t get a call from anyone in power. They get insults. They aren’t called heroes, they get slandered and dehumanized.
People like Comey make one kind of call, and not the other, for the same reason that police almost always get away with killing people, often with a pat on the back. Because when police kill people, they are doing their job, doing what they are supposed to do under this system. Enforcing what Comey calls a “disconnect” between this system of exploitation and oppression and those it rules over.
And central to everything this system is about is the oppression of Black people. Ever since this system was founded on the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of African people, the oppression of Black people has been a potentially explosive contradiction for the ruling class. Ending the oppression of Black people would be a key element of a revolution that would overturn this whole system. That revolution—to end all oppression—would, on day one, end police brutality and murder. This is the revolution that the Revolutionary Communist Party is working for.
So when Comey makes his calls, he is backing up those who are violently enforcing this divide, who are enforcing oppression, and doing “their part” to defend this whole empire of organized, systematic, relentless exploitation and degradation and despair—the system of capitalism-imperialism.
Blaming the Oppressed with the Old “Role Models” Lie
Comey pretends to acknowledge, to a point, that there is inequality and that society ignores it: “...so many boys and young men grow up in environments lacking role models, adequate education, and decent employment—they lack all sorts of opportunities that most of us take for granted. A tragedy of American life—one that most citizens are able to drive around because it doesn’t touch them—is that young people in ‘those neighborhoods’ too often inherit a legacy of crime and prison.”
Comey’s acknowledgement of “inherited” inequality whitewashes the reality that inequality is not a vestige of the past, it is present day reality. And Comey twists and distorts the cause of inequality with the old “role models” bullshit. As if, if Black people just had better role models, that would end all this oppression.
Really? Is a lack of role models responsible for astronomical rates of unemployment for Black youth? Is an absence of role models responsible for the demonization of Black and Latino people in the endless stream of cop shows? For prison-like inner-city schools or Third World levels of health care in what remains of public healthcare systems? For housing discrimination and being the victims of predatory “sub-prime” loans? For being the targets of a vast and violent movement of highly-armed right-wing vigilantes?
No, this isn’t about role models—that sick lie blames the oppressed for their oppression. These are crimes of the system, enforced with an epidemic of police murder and mass incarceration of millions. (For a serious analysis of the causes, and solution, to the oppression of Black people see “The Oppression of Black People, The Crimes of This System and the Revolution We Need”).
Calling Out Bullshit and Coming Out Strong on April 14
The fact is that this system has no future for millions of the youth. That underlies why, as Carl Dix has put it, there is a slow genocide going on that could become a fast genocide. And that underscores the stakes of standing up to and STOPPING the epidemic of police murder.
And right now the movement to do that—to STOP police murder—is at a crossroads, as spoken to by Carl Dix (see “April 14 is a day when business as usual is disrupted to STOP police murder!”).
Right now people like Comey are running these kinds of lies and poison all over the place. Wherever these spokes-pigs run this, whoever they are, they need to be called out, confronted, and exposed with some real truth about what is going on, with truth about the real problem and solution, and challenging people to STOP the epidemic of police murder.
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