Why US cops can kill with impunity

New reports of police murdering Black people seem to occur daily. Three have provoked massive protests in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Charlotte, North Carolina, and El Cajon, California.

In Charlotte, Keith Scott was sitting in his car waiting for his child to come home from school. The cops’ ridiculous cover story is that while seeking to arrest someone else, they noticed Scott with a marijuana cigarette and a gun. A video of the scene taken by his wife shows her pleading with police not to shoot him, telling them that he doesn’t have a gun and has a traumatic brain injury.

Daily demonstrations finally forced the police to release some of their videos, which they had sought to keep hidden. The footage shows a confused Scott standing next to his car after police ordered him out. He had no gun, but the police opened fire, killing him.

To bring police to justice for murdering Blacks, or for the systematic daily repression of the Black community, would weaken a central pillar of US capitalism.

North Carolina’s ultra-right state legislature and governor now have passed a law that shields cops from publicly releasing their videos of confrontations. This is the same governor and legislature that passed an infamous law barring cities in the state from passing any ordinances prohibiting discrimination against LGBTI people.

In El Cajon, a suburb of San Diego, police shot dead an unarmed mentally disturbed man, Alfred Orlando. His sister had called for help because her brother was acting erratically. “I called you to help me”, she is heard screaming, “but you killed my brother!” Eyewitnesses said the 30-year-old African American had his hands up when he was tasered by one cop and then gunned down by another.

Michael Rodriguez said, “We were leaving out of these apartments right here [pointing], facing north. I see a Black man surrounded by officers with their guns out, which caught my attention. So I tell the others, ‘Look, look, look’, so that we’re all looking, we’re watching. The Black man was with his hands up, scared to death, not knowing which way he is going to go … He’s jerking, he’s confused. He runs this way. They discharge – boom, boom, boom – five shots right into him”.

In Tulsa, police released videos of the murder of Terence Crutcher, whose car had broken down. After police arrived, footage from a police dash camera shows Crutcher slowly backing away from police with his hands in the air, then putting his hands on the side of his car as he is surrounded by officers. He then is shot down by a policewoman standing some distance away.

Crutcher’s sister, Tiffany Crutcher, said at a press conference, “We know that there was no gun in the car. We know he was unarmed. We know he was moving slow. We know he didn’t commit a crime … but my brother is dead”.

The police admit all this.

The white officer who shot him, Betty Shelby, has been charged. She says in her defence that she was “scared for her life”. But she was never in any danger.

In Charlotte, it was a Black cop who carried out the execution. In Tulsa, a woman. Having more Blacks and women in the police force is not the answer.

Will Shelby be found guilty? Other police who have been charged with killing Blacks have been found not guilty, as happened in Baltimore when Freddy Gray died while in the hands of five officers – despite it being an open and shut case. And if she is found guilty, will she get just a slap on the wrist?

It is not known if anyone will be charged in the Charlotte and El Cajon murders. No charges is the norm in the great majority of cases that have brought out mass Black Lives Matter protests in recent years.

The intransigence of capitalist politicians of both parties and of the whole legal system in refusing to curb police violence against Blacks has deep roots. One aspect has been seen in verbal attacks on Black Lives Matter. For example, the head of the FBI, James Comey, who served in various positions in Republican and Democratic administrations and was appointed by president Obama to head the FBI in 2013, said that BLM protests had demoralised the police and made it harder for them to carry out their jobs.

What jobs was he referring to? Not when police do “good”, such as directing traffic, rescuing car crash victims, helping evacuate people from the paths of hurricanes. He was talking about the systematic police repression of Blacks, which has even been documented by the federal government (which doesn’t do anything about it).

To bring police to justice for murdering Blacks, or for the systematic daily repression of the Black community, would weaken a central pillar of US capitalism. Such justice cannot and will not be done.

The systematic oppression and super-exploitation of Blacks was woven into the very fabric of the capitalist system in the US from its beginning, which took the form of slavery in the British colonies in North America. When the colonies revolted against British domination in the first US revolution, such forced labour was maintained and codified in the new constitution.

The separate colonies became states. Those which most depended on slavery were the southern states, where slave labour on large plantations produced raw materials for the new developing world capitalist market. This centred on the production of cotton for the British cloth and apparel industries, where modern capitalist production based on machinery originated.

To protect slavery in the south, states were given significant power, codified in the phrase “states rights” – a slogan of reaction and the underpinning of the undemocratic structure of the US to this day. The slave system eventually became an obstacle to the development of capitalism, a conflict resolved only in the Civil War, the second US revolution. The resistance of the slave owners was manifest in the ferocity of the conflict, which resulted in the largest number of casualties in relation to the total population of any US war since, including the world wars.

But except for the brief period of Reconstruction following the Civil War, the oppression of Blacks and the super-exploitation of Black labour were not ended, but took on new forms. In the states of the old south, there was a violent counter-revolution that established legal apartheid known as Jim Crow. This counter-revolution was carried out not only by the new capitalist governments of the south, but also by the federal government. In the rest of the country, de facto segregation became the norm.

The Jim Crow system of legal apartheid wasn’t abolished until the mass Black uprising of the 1960s. While this was a major victory and changed the US, the oppression and super-exploitation of the majority of Blacks continued. This has been exposed by the new Black Lives Matter movement led by young Blacks, including many women.

The police help maintain this system of oppression and exploitation by keeping a lid on the Black community through mass, organised violence. The police are the enforcers of the system of institutionalised racism, which is essential to US capitalism.

This can only be overthrown by a third revolution, which will combine a socialist revolution of the whole working class to abolish capitalism with a Black revolution to overthrow institutionalised racism. The recently released platform of Black Lives Matter points in this direction.

We are very far from this new revolution. In many ways we have been set back. One example is the weakening of the union movement and its betrayal by its class-collaborationist leadership. It will take struggle on many fronts by the oppressed and exploited, which will have ups and downs, defeats and partial victories on the road ahead.