> >This statement about cops makes me very uncomfortable. Because it doesn't
> take into account that my friends in East Atlanta hate it that the police
> don't come for a simple car theft or something. And I like that the cops
> pass down our East Point streets frequently, and a lot of them are pretty
> nice. And underpaid.
>
> But what really makes me uncomfortable about such talk is the way it
> seperates us, from real actual living people.
>
> Armed revolution against a state that spends godzillions of dollars on
> weapons is not an option.
There are a number of inter-related points here, and exploring any one could be a lengthy process. My main interest is the role of the police, and I will be a bit abrupt in handling the other matters.
"Armed Revolution": I suspect a certain romanticism in the concept of revolution here, but in any case the weapons are not very relevant. (a) Most of them can't be used in civil conflict for various reasons. (b) As Brecht noted, a machine gun is useless without a person to fire it. (c) The possibility of revolution (including that small moment of the revolutionary process, the insurrection, is of no relevance to anything, since the necessity of it for human survival is so clear.
"Real, actual living people." There are, to confine ourselves to the U.S. for the moment, somewhere around a quarter of a billion of them. I have no desire to relate to all of them, and to relate to *some* of them I must necessarily to relate only antagonistically to certain others.
Police. Whatever be the personal qualities of some or many police, police are in the employ of the enemy. Like prison guards, death squads, the INS, and the various other agents of state power who (individually) come for the most part from the working class, they have declassed themselves. This is a given of history. (May I mention that *all* my personal encounters with individual police, even on the occasion of my arrest some years ago, have been perfectly friendly.)
Professional police departments as we know them were originally created (replacing the older constabulary) for the primary purpose of controlling labor. Police in black areas (including black police, though some of them may be traitors to their employers) are an army of occupation.
The overwhelming proportion of men and women in prison should not be there. (This has nothing to do with whether they were technically guilty or innocent as charged: the charges ought not exist.) There is no way that a man or woman can serve as police and still recognize and honor this truth. No honest man or woman owuld arrest anyone for the retail sale of drugs, for shop lifting, for an almost endless list of "offenses." No honest man or woman would serve in any capacity, even as a cook, to maintain a lockdown in a prison. The murder of Fred Hampton, of George Jackson, and almost daily crimes against people are of the essence of the police power, not aberrations. No honest man or woman would serve on the faculty of a department of criminal justice in a university.
Carrol