Justice for all killed/tortured/impacted by policing is when there are no more police killings, torture and terror. This means we must end the systems that require a government that uses murder, torture and terror as how it operates. We cannot separate policing from capitalism.
US capitalism which we know was born out of the massive spoils of slavery and enabled through massive genocide of the indigenous population. The Chicago Police Department was formed 3 yrs before the incorporation of Chicago as a city and 3 years after the Black Hawk war.
The Black Hawk war was in part how Chicago was “settled.” In part of that violent process, colonial settler capitalism necessitated a domestic army, policing to solidifying this geography into Chicago. In abolishing police, we are also talking about the “abolition” of capitalism.
Once slavery was abolished, policing and incarceration, in part, replaced the slaveocracy in administering racialized control by state. As Black folks began migrating north, this meant Chicago’s Blck population started to grow. By the 1920s Black people were 5% of the population.
In 1929, a the Illinois Crime Survey found that Black people were murdered by police at a rate of 10 times that of white people. In 2017, the Department of Justice report stated that CPD kills Black people at a rate of 10 times that of white people. Nothing has changed.
These identical rates of murder, takes almost 100 years apart, show that despite the propaganda of the government, the disproportionate rate of killings by police of Black people has not shifted. It hasn’t shifted because it is part of the work of policing.
It is not an anomaly that US policing, extra-specially target Black folks for killing and all other degrees of violence that lead up to murder because this is actually the design of their work. It is actually their purpose. US policing is predicated on defending the racial caste
US policing is predicated on defending, implementing and managing racial stratification in order to protect the disproportionate distribution of resources that capitalism necessitates. This of course is not policing’s only role. They simultaneously kill & incarcerate Native ppl
The only population killed at a higher rate than Black folks are the indigenous. Policing also is required to control workers and defend and protect property and property holders. That is why policing throughout history have also killed labor organizers and leaders.
Police exist to uphold and defend the operatings of capital. They exist to protect the billionaires and millionaires and their institutions. The police’s role is to subjugate, contain, and neutralizing all forces that challenge this.
We are challenged as a movement, in strategy and tactic. We are challenged to name and implement measures to get to roots of systemic violence. In so doing, its helpful to understand how and why the system functions as it does so that we can be better informed in its dismantling.
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