Lament of the Mind

fellowpassengerstothegrave:

Cops are the footsoldiers of the state, and the state as we know it is the footsoldier of capital. The US government, for example, whether run by Republicans or Democrats, works diligently to preserve the interests of the wealthy over the interests of the working class. American legislative patterns are far to the right of the American public’s opinions at almost any given time for precisely that reason. Legislators work for the companies that lobby them, not their constituents.

An individual police officer could very easily be a decent person. I would argue that most are not, because the job would drive away most decent people. But the organizational structure of the police is much like that of the military- orders are handed down from the government (often in the form of legislation), then handed from the top administrative cops down to beat cops who are then supposed to follow the order regardless of its legitimacy.

The only value a “good” cop has might be in his agency- that is, his ability to choose to make a good decision. But that agency is stripped by the apparatus of the police force itself. The “good” cop is a cog in a machine whose purpose is to protect capital and the state at all costs, even as it is in the best interests of the working class to destroy those. For this reason the interests of cops and workers are fundamentally incompatible. As communists we are interested in the building of a world where production, distribution, and work are centered around human needs and determined by community members themselves. This interest cannot be reconciled with the interest of the US government, which is to perpetuate, protect, and accumulate capital.

And like I said I do not believe most cops to be decent human beings. Cops who harass homeless people sleeping in public, who respond to petty shoplifting calls, who shoot black people dead in the street, are never forced to do so. Nobody holds a gun to the head of a cop and says, “If you don’t stop and frisk one more black kid I’m killing you.” Even when he could easily falsify a stop, record a stop that never happened, etc the police officer will often enthusiastically choose to stop, frisk, and harass a teenager. And when the people most likely to be killed by police are overwhelmingly people of color, lgbt people, poor people, etc the individual politics of a police officer are of absolutely no concern to me. Likewise, the people hurt most by capitalism are overwhelmingly people of color, disabled people, poor people, and lgbt people- so even if an individual cop loves black people, the state whose interests he is protecting does not and in fact wants us dead.

TLDR/shortened for accessibility: The law and capital are stacked against and in fact killing marginalized groups daily, and cops are paid to protect the law and capital.