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U.S. Politics and the Economy

Harbinger of a Police State!

Police threats against Colin Kaepernick’s protest

By Chris Kinder

Always in connection with workers’ rebellions, racism, and imperialist wars and adventures abroad, police agencies in the U.S. have been militarized, aided pogroms against Black people, and entered politics as the obedient servants of their bosses, the bourgeois state. In the U.S., federal, state and local cops have executed striking workers; rounded up anarchists, communists and immigrants; pursued antiwar activists; and framed and sent to death or prison hellholes those who were considered enemies of the state. 

This has included FBI agents marching en masse at the White House, to protest the potential of a pardon of AIM activist Leonard Peltier by the departing President Bill Clinton (who, naturally, dropped any intention he may have had—which I doubt he did—to do so.)

So it should come as no surprise that Santa Clara cops (Santa Clara being the new home of the San Francisco 49ers), in a letter to the SF 49ers dated September 2nd, and presuming to speak on behalf of cops nationwide, have publicly threatened the football team’s owners with withdrawal of their policing “services” if they do not punish Colin Kaepernick for his peaceful protest of police brutality and murder of unarmed Black citizens by kneeling during the playing of the national anthem at games. 

Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal—also targeted by police—were (falsely) accused of violent crimes, but Kaepernick? His “crime” was just speaking his mind in a public, demonstrative way. 

Santa Clara cops were oh-so hurt by Kaepernick’s sit-down! 

According to their “union,” Kaepernick’s act of protest was hurtful and insulting to the cops:

“Our membership acknowledges that police officers are human and are not perfect. However, blanket statements that police officers in general, murder minorities is completely false and insulting to the dedicated men and women in law enforcement agencies across America. 

“These intentional acts and inflammatory statements by Mr. Kaepernick are insulting to the members of the Santa Clara Police Officers Association (SCPOA).”1

We can have no sympathy. While it is of course true that only a small minority of police officers have actually shot down unarmed Black men in cold blood, it is also true that they all operate according to the same protocols. In the case of police patrols in Black communities, the assumption is made in advance that young Black males on the street are probably gang members, probably armed and dangerous, and therefore a threat to police. Police are trained to shoot first and ask questions later in order to defend themselves against any perceived threat. And if, after the fact of a police murder, no gun or other evidence of such a threat to police is found, then an “I feared for my life” defense is simply invented. 

This is not just about individual “bad apples;” this is the systematic approach to targeted communities to which all cops are bound.  

It is important to note here that the Santa Clara cops’ “union,” SCPOA, makes its argument on the grounds that Kaepernick acted while he was on the job as an employee of the 49ers. As an employee, Kaepernick, they said, needs to be disciplined because he has made “inaccurate, incorrect and inflammatory statements against police officers!” Wait, are not unions supposed to defend the rights of all workers to their opinions? Aren’t they supposed to have solidarity with each other?

Cops are not workers 

Certainly, there are times when such principles of solidarity do not happen between real unions; but it should be apparent that this is not a “union” at all: it is an organization of cops, the historic, strike-breaking enemy of all working people. Yet so many of them have so-called “unions” and are members in real workers’ unions and labor federations. This is a travesty, which must end. At least one union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers (ILWU), remembering its members who were killed by police in the 1934 longshore strike—which sparked the San Francisco General Strike—says: police out of the unions!

The cops may get their way here, since the 49ers owners, who haven’t done anything yet that we know of against Kaepernick, will feel the need to have cops patrolling the stadium, and thus may take some retribution against Kaepernick. The Santa Clara cops point out that their members “volunteer” for the assignment to stadium duty during games. So, that makes it OK for their fraternal organization to threaten the 49ers with the withdrawal of police “services” at games at which some “employee” might make a statement critical of police. I thought that police “services” had to be performed regardless of citizen complaints. Doesn’t that in fact happen all the time?

An occupying army

Consider the historic and on-going role of the police as an occupying army in Black neighborhoods across the U.S. Citizen complaints abound, as the cops shoot first and ask questions later, falsify their reports and refuse to go public with their past offenses, not to mention failing to be jailed for their blatant killings. Do the cops want to put an end to citizen complaints like Kaepernick’s? Why don’t they withdraw their “services” from those areas immediately? End of the modern-day slave patrols; end of the problem. Let’s have integrated Black, Latino and white working peoples’ democratic community patrols in all targeted neighborhoods!

Amongst the many public comments about Kaepernick’s protest was one that gave a hint of the important history that lies behind Kaepernick’s protest, and behind the police themselves. That was a letter in the San Francisco Chronicle, September 1, 2016, which is here in it’s entirety:

Misguided poem

“Reading the third verse of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ makes me wonder why any African American, or any caring person, would honor the song. Two lines, ‘No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,’ refer to the American slaves who were recruited by the British during the War of 1812. The British, thanks largely to the efforts of William Wilberforce, had already abolished slave trade.

“They gave freedom to the American slaves who joined their cause. These two lines were Francis Scott Key’s celebration of the death of the slaves who had freed themselves when he saw the flag still flying the morning after the September 13, 1814, battle at Fort McHenry.

“Given this context, the next two lines, ‘And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave,’ take on a new meaning. Tradition provides comfort, but we need to understand when it is time to move beyond misguided traditions. Ours should be a land that provides freedom and equality for all, not just the free.”

This much welcome letter, by Robert Plantz of Santa Rosa, raises questions, not just about U.S. purposes in the War of 1812, but also those of the rebellious colonies in the War of Independence, 36 years earlier. Although the British had abolished the international slave trade by 1812 (due in part to the life-long efforts of William Wilberforce,) they had not done so in 1776; yet in both wars, the British actively sought out and freed escaping slaves; and they did so whether or not the freed individuals agreed to fight on the British side. The British eagerly sought out escapees, inviting them to come to their naval ships stationed in Chesapeake Bay; and many of the slaves who came willingly returned to plantations surreptitiously to bring others.

Real purpose of the “American Revolution”

The point here is not that the British at the time were such great emancipators in their colonies generally—they weren’t—but that the Americans sought to secure their own empire as a slave state without British interference. British self-serving motives were to crush the American rebellion; but for the colonists, while “democracy” for a very few white male property owners was an issue, preserving the slave-driven economy of the their future empire was the real purpose of the so-called “American Revolution.” 

This in my view makes it not a revolution at all, but a counterrevolution.

And the police? While local urban constabularies emerged in the 1840s, the true origins of today’s cops lie in the slave patrols, both privately organized and state militias, dating from the late 1600s. Slavery having been defined as for Blacks only, the patrols enforced the first version of the criminalization of Blacks in the U.S., which persists today. If you were Black, and didn’t have written permission to be off the plantation, you were a criminal by definition. You could be punished by whim of the patrollers, including by hanging. 

And in the post-Reconstruction era, it was the same; just a little more sophisticated...and even more dependent on a criminal injustice system to keep the Blacks down. This consisted of local magistrates with phony “courts” designed to convict any Black person of a “crime” invented by some white person. The “court” then literally got to sell the Black person as an indentured servant to some employer (who was oh-so handily present at “court”) to work to pay off his “fine.”2 (Sharecropping was another method of keeping Blacks down, as was, of course, Klan terror of Black communities.)

Slavery by another name is still with us

Today’s racist stop-and-frisk, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later police patrols of Black communities, immigrant areas and other oppressed peoples are the outcome of this long history. And the pattern of victimization and imprisonment for indebtedness to the state for trumped-up petty “crimes,” which was exposed after the police killing of a young Black man in Ferguson, Missouri, is a major factor in today’s slavery by another name throughout the U.S. I hesitated to use the term “harbinger” of a police state, since in the Black community it IS a virtual police state. However, this society as a whole, though definitely not a “democracy” by any stretch of the imagination, is not yet fascist, and not yet a complete police state. But the potential is there for the U.S. to become one, and it is a looming threat, which is well illustrated by the Santa Clara cops’ outrageous demand.

How is this to be dealt with? In Germany in the late 1920s and ’30s, Nazi fascism loomed, but so did workers revolution. The ruling class eventually opted for the Nazis in order to stave off the revolutionary threat. The workers could have united to oppose the fascist thugs in the streets, and thus pave the way to revolution, but the Stalinist leaders of the Communist Party prevented that with a sectarian refusal to form united fronts with Social Democrats. 

This is not Germany in the 1930s. But today, a united and integrated working-class revolutionary movement could pave the way forward by building workers and mass actions to defend Black communities from police persecution, and work to free political prisoners such as Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and of course, support protestors like Colin Kaepernick. 



1 This and all quotes from the Santa Clara Police Officers Association are from “Police Union Threatens to Stop Working Unless 49ers ‘Take Action’ Against Kaepernick,” by Matt Agorist, September 3, 2016, http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-threaten-49ers-action-kaepernick/#0SPxqDIPDpMo5GVw.03

2 Douglas A Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name, New York, 2008, is an excellent source for this post-Reconstruction story.