It’s been more than a year since the murders of Mike Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Staten Island at the hands of police. But the fire lit by their unjust deaths has yet to be extinguished. And once again, people are protesting.
In New York, people are set to march not only against a few specific killings by cops but against “police terror” in general. And the term used could not be more apt. Over the last year, as well as over the course of the U.S. history, police all over the country have engaged in a ruthless terror campaign. And to this day, blood continues to spill and the bodies are still piling up as the cops work to impose fear and obedience onto the oppressed and marginalized.
Police Terror
According to The Guardian, in 2015, police have killed more than 920 people so far with that number expected to go well beyond 1,000 by the end of the year. And thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, the U.S. has been forced, over and over again since last year, to face the fact that a disproportionate amount of police terror is inflicted on communities of color, particularly Black communities. Nonetheless, the terror continues.
Only last month, police in Maryland killed 19-year-old Keith McLeod after he supposedly pointed his fingers at police “as if with a weapon.” In July, a cop in Mississippi pulled Jonathan Sanders from his horse and choked him to death with a flashlight. In February, as if set in Palestine, Antonio Zambrano-Montes was shot down by police in Washington state for throwing rocks at police and their cars. In January, cops in Colorado shot down 17-year-old Jessie Hernandez as she drove a stolen car and claimed, as police always do when they shoot at a driver, that she was trying to run them over. And before all these cases, cops in Cleveland shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice last November while he was playing in the park with a toy gun. The cops involved in all these murders will probably face little-to-no consequences.
Protesters marching in Harlem on June 22 after the Charleston shooting. | Photo: Ashoka Jegroo
Whether they’re committing a crime or not, Black and Brown people constantly live in fear of running into the wrong cop and not making it home alive. When even unarmed, young white men like Zachary Hammond and Deven Guilford are being murdered by police, one can only guess the level of fear experienced by people of color, who have been historically targeted for state sanctioned violence.
Police terror not only manifests itself as murder though. Police terror is also the fear imposed on oppressed and marginalized communities through aggressive over-policing and harassment. As shown by the Department of Justice’s report, released in March, Ferguson’s police department, like police in many American cities, often aggressively patrol communities of color looking for even the tiniest infractions to ticket or arrest people for.
The report showed that Ferguson’s cops essentially acted as an armed force violently extracting wealth from an already poor Black community. The constant harassment, bullying, and threat of violence eventually led to the people of Ferguson finally snapping after Mike Brown’s death. This approach to policing, often referred to as “broken windows” or “community policing,” is still practiced in departments across the country.
Whereas in Ferguson this was done to generate revenue, in places like New York City, this kind of policing is also often used as a method for displacing communities of color to make room for future gentrification. When they are not spying on or violently repressing protests against their brutality, police are literally scaring marginalized people into their homes and eventually out of their own neighborhoods.
Protesters burn the U.S. flag in protest on May 19. | Photo: Ashoka Jegroo
Of course, all of this isn’t new. From their beginnings, the United States’ police have always functioned as a force for controlling poor people and minorities, especially Black people. And the exploitation and violent displacement of colonized people is an American tradition as well. Police today, as they have done in past, still work to either control, exploit, or drive out the colonized and oppressed. And sadly, the terror does not end with only the police nor does it confine itself to the United States’ borders.
State Terror
Police terror is only a small subset of U.S. state terror, a kind of fear imposed on oppressed people domestically and internationally. Kalief Browder committed suicide in June after spending three years in the infamously brutal Rikers Island jail, much of it in solitary confinement, for allegedly stealing a backpack.
When Mya Hall was shot after making a wrong turn near the Baltimore headquarters of the NSA, federal authorities worked with police in Maryland to ensure that no one ever faced any consequences. And along with the regular NSA spying, anyone who chooses to protest against these injustices can expect to be spied on by the Department of Homeland Security, as shown in a report released in July by The Intercept. A former prison guard from Abu Ghraib, a hotbed of prisoner torture, currently supervises the policing of protests in New York City. The feds have become much more advanced since their days of repressing the Civil Rights movement.
We need more shutdowns of commercial and political centers. We need to create a situation in which the state’s old ways of doing things simply cannot continue.
Internationally, the U.S. is currently engaging in a campaign of state terror via the use of drones, the horrifying extent of which was also shown in a recent report by The Intercept. Often knowingly using bad intelligence, the U.S. routinely kills innocent bystanders in drone strikes. In fact, most of the people killed are not the intended targets. This capriciousness with the killing of Black and Brown people around the world is itself terrifying. And like police terror, U.S. state terror has a history that leads smoothly to the present. The current campaign of drone terror follows a long series of invasions, occupations, bombings, CIA-instigated coups, and tortured prisoners
The Struggle Continues
All of this goes to show that the police terror imposed on the oppressed within the U.S. is intricately tied up with state terror imposed on the oppressed around the world. One cannot decry the 1985 bombing of the Black radical group MOVE by Philadelphia cops and then approve of the U.S. bombing people in Afghanistan and Yemen today, and vice versa. These shared oppressions and their connected histories demand that the struggle against U.S. state terror be further internationalized. Steps have been made to connect Black Lives Matter with the struggle of the Palestinians and with the victims of state violence in Ayotzinapa, Mexico. This needs to continue and expand to other oppressed peoples.
The protests must also continue too. But the harsh repression of Black Lives Matter by local and federal authorities, along with the lack of substantial progress made, shows that more radical tactics will have to be employed. We need more shutdowns of commercial and political centers. We need to create a situation in which the state’s old ways of doing things simply cannot continue. We cannot simply march and sing our way to liberation. But we will definitely have to struggle and fight on our way there.
