Holy Fuck this is Disgusting

[Ocean Seal]

Lee County Deputies Tied Suspect to a Chair, Gagged Him, and Pepper-Sprayed Him to Death (http://reason.com/blog/2011/12/23/lee-county-deputies-tied-suspect-to-a-ch)

I just have no words.

[GatesofLenin]

2 and a half years later and no criminal charges brought forward against the deputies that tortured this poor man to death??? :cursing:

[Decolonize The Left]

Fuck the police.

- August

Yes.

[Os Cangaceiros]

acab, fuck the police, etc.

[piet11111]

Are the pigs doing some kind of competition who can be the biggest fucktard ?

No wonder the black panthers had weapons to protect themselves from the pigs.

[Prometeo liberado]

Does this surprise anyone? What does surprise me is that when the police do it it's an "isolated incident". When your not wearing a badge then its genocide or some other nonsense.

[Threetune]

“Workers in uniform" say the counterrevolutionary ‘lefts’

[Drosophila]

Hey not all cops are assholes! There's around 0.2% of them that are good people!

[Philosopher Jay]

Here the story of a policeman who saved the life of a 23 month old baby girl (http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/53092584-78/girl-police-candy-cane.html.csp)

Here is the story of a policeman who saved the lives of two brother in their 30's trying to commit suicide. (http://joco913.com/news/shawnee-officer-saves-lives-of-two-brothers/)

It is absurd to judge the approximately 1,000,000 policepersons in the United States by the extremely good or bad actions of a few dozen or a few hundred of them.

Soldiers in the United States military have committed far more atrocities than policemen. Compare the 200,000 - 1,000,000 killed by the U.S. military in Iraq to the less than 5,000 killed by police forces in the United States over this same period of the last ten years. No individual soldier gets blamed for these actions and soldiers are not considered counterrevolutionary as a group. In the same way the 99.5% of policepersons should not be held responsible for the killings done by less than 1/2 of one percent nor should they all be considered essentially counter-revoluionary.

While in the 19th Century and first half of the 20th century, police could generally be counted as primarily reactionary, that is simply not true today. Most police departments are well integrated with Blacks, Latinos and women, and there are all kinds of contradictions within police departments, many of which are facing severe cutbacks as all government services and personal are.

Instead of sticking to outmoded dogmas, it is important for Marxists to start their analysis from actual class conditions in the present and not start from some imaginary eternal world where all policemen are evil, upholding capitalist property laws, and all criminals are good because they transgress these laws. The latter view is anarchist, not Marxist.

it is important to recruit police to a socialist prospective and not allow capitalists to completely control these members of the working class.


Lee County Deputies Tied Suspect to a Chair, Gagged Him, and Pepper-Sprayed Him to Death (http://reason.com/blog/2011/12/23/lee-county-deputies-tied-suspect-to-a-ch)

I just have no words.

[Ravachol]

Here the story of a policeman who saved the life of a 23 month old baby girl (http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/53092584-78/girl-police-candy-cane.html.csp)

Here is the story of a policeman who saved the lives of two brother in their 30's trying to commit suicide. (http://joco913.com/news/shawnee-officer-saves-lives-of-two-brothers/)

It is absurd to judge the approximately 1,000,000 policepersons in the United States by the extremely good or bad actions of a few dozen or a few hundred of them.

Soldiers in the United States military have committed far more atrocities than policemen. Compare the 200,000 - 1,000,000 killed by the U.S. military in Iraq to the less than 5,000 killed by police forces in the United States over this same period of the last ten years. No individual soldier gets blamed for these actions and soldiers are not considered counterrevolutionary as a group. In the same way the 99.5% of policepersons should not be held responsible for the killings done by less than 1/2 of one percent nor should they all be considered essentially counter-revoluionary.

While in the 19th Century and first half of the 20th century, police could generally be counted as primarily reactionary, that is simply not true today. Most police departments are well integrated with Blacks, Latinos and women, and there are all kinds of contradictions within police departments, many of which are facing severe cutbacks as all government services and personal are.

Instead of sticking to outmoded dogmas, it is important for Marxists to start their analysis from actual class conditions in the present and not start from some imaginary eternal world where all policemen are evil, upholding capitalist property laws, and all criminals are good because they transgress these laws. The latter view is anarchist, not Marxist.

it is important to recruit police to a socialist prospective and not allow capitalists to completely control these members of the working class.

You're delusional. The police are not part of the working class. The police is the armed extension of the state monopoly on violence, they exist to guarantee the maintenance of private property and the exercise of bourgeois law. Their role is that of ensuring the smooth running of the gears of class society. They do not take part in the process of valorisation and have no surplus value extracted out of them, their task is to ensure the sovereignty of the bourgeois state and private property. Individual cops 'preventing someone from drowning' doesn't change a thing about their systemic function. Their integration with various other communities is similar to the integration of individuals from these communities in the structures of representative power. You guys have a black president for fucks' sake, does that make the presidential office proletarian too :rolleyes:

When the state integrates communities, representatives from various social groups or from this or that class, it does so to reduce the bulk of that group to spectators who submit to the same apparatus when it wears a different mask. Cops are cops, whether white, black or latino. Bosses are bosses, whether male of female, heterosexual or gay. The content of their social role is what is to be opposed by any genuine communist, regardless of the form it takes.

Anyone who has ever had a nice run-in with the cops for anything (during a strike, during a demonstration, being in a squat, being at a party or where-fucking-ever) knows what vile types it attracts and how their entire institution promotes such behavior.

Arm-chair 'Marxists' drunk on the idea of building some populist 'socialist' movement where we all hold hands with 'working class cops' and 'sympathetic businessmen' only show how far they are removed from the everyday reality of working-class life. It's for a reason most working-class folks at best distrust and often hate the cops.

I guess the prime minister, managers and generals in the armed forces are all workers too in your eyes, they all get wages right? :rolleyes:

[Ocean Seal]

I too was once a bootlicker. But the police is not a neutral entity. It doesn't matter how well integrated they are with our communities. The police are a weapon of the bourgeoisie, and their capacity as an institution is necessarily reactionary and that hasn't changed. There is absolutely no reason why we should think that we can recruit them to the working class. Rights for the police means being better protected against law suits, they have every privilege that working people lack, and they chronically beat us in the streets. Have you been watching the news. Because the police have been destroying the first genuine working class movement we've had in a while. Evicting people, pepper-spraying people, assaulting people, arresting protesters.

ACAB ACAB ACAB ACAB

They do this because its their job to do this. Its the bourgeoisie's job to exploit us, and its the politicians job to mislead us. They are all our enemies.

Not individual police officers as you were speaking of in your post, but the institution of the police. We are against the military as well, as you will always see the left supporting anti-militarism. Military personnel are different from the police in one important way though, they don't have their jobs for life. At one point their are a reactionary weapon, and after they bourgeoisie are done using them they join the workforce. While they are soldiers we stand militantly against their activity. That is not an excuse for the police.

They aren't on our side, it should be plainly obvious by their nature towards every militant working class movement past 1919.

[Tim Cornelis]

Here the story of a policeman who saved the life of a 23 month old baby girl (http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/53092584-78/girl-police-candy-cane.html.csp)

Here is the story of a policeman who saved the lives of two brother in their 30's trying to commit suicide. (http://joco913.com/news/shawnee-officer-saves-lives-of-two-brothers/)

It is absurd to judge the approximately 1,000,000 policepersons in the United States by the extremely good or bad actions of a few dozen or a few hundred of them.

In the Netherlands they gave a statue to two SS-soldiers who had saved the lives of two children. Two SS-soldiers saved the lives of two blond children en then went on to kill whomever. This tells us nothing, as doing a good deed does not exempt them from protecting capitalist property, backing their corrupt cop-colleagues, etc.


Soldiers in the United States military have committed far more atrocities than policemen. Compare the 200,000 - 1,000,000 killed by the U.S. military in Iraq to the less than 5,000 killed by police forces in the United States over this same period of the last ten years. No individual soldier gets blamed for these actions and soldiers are not considered counterrevolutionary as a group. In the same way the 99.5% of policepersons should not be held responsible for the killings done by less than 1/2 of one percent nor should they all be considered essentially counter-revoluionary.

Soldiers are, imo, counter-revolutionary in that they have joined an organisation that exists for the defence of the ruling class (as on reason). Also, the US military has not killed between 200,000 and 1,000,000 civilians, there have been roughly 300,000 civilian casualties in Iraq most of which were killed by sectarian violence.

You need to ask yourself a question, how is it that "rotten apple" cops get away with murder, theft, assault, etc.? The answer is the blue code of silence. Cops look at the police as a community they need to protect from outsiders: citizens. And therefore lying to protect a cop from persecution is just.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Code_of_Silence


The Blue Code of Silence (also known as the "Blue Shield") is an unwritten rule among police officers in the United States not to report on another colleague's errors, misconducts or crimes.


Face it: most cops are complicit in police brutality.


While in the 19th Century and first half of the 20th century, police could generally be counted as primarily reactionary, that is simply not true today. Most police departments are well integrated with Blacks, Latinos and women, and there are all kinds of contradictions within police departments, many of which are facing severe cutbacks as all government services and personal are.

A multicultural death squad, how nice.


Instead of sticking to outmoded dogmas, it is important for Marxists to start their analysis from actual class conditions in the present and not start from some imaginary eternal world where all policemen are evil, upholding capitalist property laws, and all criminals are good because they transgress these laws. The latter view is anarchist, not Marxist.

The job of police is to enforce law, which in bourgeois society are bourgeois laws, thence they must necessarily defend capitalist property laws or else they are not police: ergo, all police enforce capitalist property laws.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

The police as an institution encourage this kind of behavior, but all police are human, just as all bureaucrats and businessmen are. Some bureaucrats and businessmen are perfectly nice people who do morally upstanding things-Marx didn't lay down a moral system but a scientific understanding of class relationships and I see no reason why a Marxist would use their categories to make such a moral judgement about either the bourgeoisie or police. On the other hand anyone subscribing to the Marxist notion of class and the state must be able to see that the police force as a social institution does try to inculcate retrogressive thinking, a militarized society and a sustained level of discriminatory abuse towards populations seen as "high risk" for criminal behavior. The real evils of the police force stems from the fact that it encourages otherwise upstanding citizens to join then increasingly alienates them from the general population that they are theoretically tasked with "protecting." A whole system of institutions is built around encouraging society to see the police as necessary and convincing the policemen and women themselves that the institution they work for needs to be expanded.

[piet11111]

The police are specifically trained and indoctrinated to view the ordinary citizen as a criminal and if by chance they are not guilty of something its only because they haven't had the chance to do something yet and in time they will.


And the more specific their training the worse they get think of riot cops or swat types.

Its not the army that worries me as their training has always been to go out and kill the "other" instead of their own citizens but cops are always trained to go after their "own"

[Comrade Samuel]

We are America we *NEVER* give cruel or unusual pubnishment, that is unless they are intoxicated in public in which case they are to be treated worse than our rapeists, murderers or terrorists... Land of the free, home of the hypotcracy

[Tim Finnegan]

Here the story of a policeman who saved the life of a 23 month old baby girl (http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/53092584-78/girl-police-candy-cane.html.csp)

Here is the story of a policeman who saved the lives of two brother in their 30's trying to commit suicide. (http://joco913.com/news/shawnee-officer-saves-lives-of-two-brothers/)

It is absurd to judge the approximately 1,000,000 policepersons in the United States by the extremely good or bad actions of a few dozen or a few hundred of them.

Soldiers in the United States military have committed far more atrocities than policemen. Compare the 200,000 - 1,000,000 killed by the U.S. military in Iraq to the less than 5,000 killed by police forces in the United States over this same period of the last ten years. No individual soldier gets blamed for these actions and soldiers are not considered counterrevolutionary as a group. In the same way the 99.5% of policepersons should not be held responsible for the killings done by less than 1/2 of one percent nor should they all be considered essentially counter-revoluionary.

While in the 19th Century and first half of the 20th century, police could generally be counted as primarily reactionary, that is simply not true today. Most police departments are well integrated with Blacks, Latinos and women, and there are all kinds of contradictions within police departments, many of which are facing severe cutbacks as all government services and personal are.

Instead of sticking to outmoded dogmas, it is important for Marxists to start their analysis from actual class conditions in the present and not start from some imaginary eternal world where all policemen are evil, upholding capitalist property laws, and all criminals are good because they transgress these laws. The latter view is anarchist, not Marxist.

it is important to recruit police to a socialist prospective and not allow capitalists to completely control these members of the working class.
Perhaps when they turn in their badges and renounce their participation in the oppressive apparatus of the bourgeois state, we'll be able to accept them as fellow workers. Until then, they are the agents of capital, the deliverymen of the daily violence which sustains this rancid system, and so cannot be regarded as anything other than collaborators, scabs, and our irrevocable enemies.

[RadioRaheem84]

Well said Finn.

Philosopher Jay, is your dad a cop or a relative a member of the police force?

As an institution, the police are not a neutral force. In a capitalist society, especially one in a downturn, they become effective agents of the state protecting those who have against those who don't.

[Philosopher Jay]

Read about the Boston Police Strike of 1919 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Police_Strike).
See how frightened the capitalists were of the police. They called them "Bolsheviks" when they united to defend their class interests. This is what we need to happen again on a mass scale.
A worker is a worker because of her/his relationship to the means of production. Police do not own or control the means of production in the United States. They are forced by economic circumstances and their own powerlessness to produce what the capitalists want produced, just as all workers are.
It is difficult to see how any socialist revolution will take place without the recruitment of masses of police to the side of the socialist working class.

[La Comédie Noire]

There are good cops and bad cops, but it is important to understand either way they are cops and their social role is the preservation of the status quo.

The ones who come over to the side of revolution will be forgiven, those who don't will not.

[Commissar Rykov]

You need to ask yourself a question, how is it that "rotten apple" cops get away with murder, theft, assault, etc.? The answer is the blue code of silence. Cops look at the police as a community they need to protect from outsiders: citizens. And therefore lying to protect a cop from persecution is just.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Code_of_Silence
Exactly, while taking an Intro to Criminal Justice class we covered the very fact that the Police spend a lot of time obstructing justice in any way possible. The reality is the police don't view themselves with the Proletariat as they consider civilians to be under them and thus subject to their power. The Bourgeoisie wanted it to be this way since the police were originally created to protect private property and that is still their mandate. Policing communities is a rather recent evolution in law enforcement and one mostly to make themselves seem less of a threat. The reality is the police aren't there to protect the community they are there to keep the community in line so that business can keep operating as usual.

[Veovis]

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lrzcl0xQj21qe11kdo1_400.jpg

[Krano]

Death to the protectors of the bourgeoisie.

[Ravachol]

Read about the Boston Police Strike of 1919 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Police_Strike).
See how frightened the capitalists were of the police. They called them "Bolsheviks" when they united to defend their class interests. This is what we need to happen again on a mass scale.
A worker is a worker because of her/his relationship to the means of production. Police do not own or control the means of production in the United States. They are forced by economic circumstances and their own powerlessness to produce what the capitalists want produced, just as all workers are.


Their relationship to the means of production is one of defense, their interests are the maintenance of private property as per their very social function, similar to managers and other disciplinary institutions of Capital.

Class isn't some vulgar "you're not a factory boss so you're a prole" thing, it's a complex strategic social position where the content of one's daily activities in relationship to the wider social framework determine what class you're in. The police are not a part of the working class, no matter how bad you want them to be for whatever delusional reason.

Economic circumstances force everyone to be part of Capitalism, even the bourgeoisie is forced to act in the way it does because of the transcendent laws of Capital. The bourgeoisie, though they profit from it, are but puppets to the impersonal machinations of Capital's laws. So that argument is null and void. What matters is the content of given social roles, and the content of the role of policemen consists of the exercise of violence as per the dictates of the bourgeois state. They are molded, from their actions to their entire mindset, to behave as it's extension, to uphold it's domination and to guarantee social 'peace'. There's a reason the police has historically always been the prime strikebreaking institution.



It is difficult to see how any socialist revolution will take place without the recruitment of masses of police to the side of the socialist working class.

In a revolutionary situation the police is usually the last institution to crumble. The armed forces have been known throughout history to side with the revolutionary forces far sooner, which isn't surprising because the bulk of the daily activity of the police is composed of, well, POLICING the proletariat and keeping them in line with the dictates of the bourgeois state. That's the whole point. If policemen side with revolutionary forces they do so by ceasing to be policemen, by laying down their badges and turning their guns upwards instead of downwards. The police as an institution only has revolutionary potential in it's complete dissolution.

[Os Cangaceiros]

It is actually extremely easy to imagine a socialist revolution that doesn't have the support of the po-po. One recent example, which wasn't a socialist revolution but certainly qualified as political upheaval, was Egypt earlier this year, and the Egyptian central security forces rapidly losing control over the Egyptian streets, after which the military was called in. That's what happens if social conflict gets big enough, the military gets called in, even in large riot situations like Detroit in the late 60s.

[Bronco]

The sad thing is that the only place I ever hear about incidents like this is on Revleft

[Tim Finnegan]

Read about the Boston Police Strike of 1919 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Police_Strike).
See how frightened the capitalists were of the police. They called them "Bolsheviks" when they united to defend their class interests. This is what we need to happen again on a mass scale.
The threat posed to the capitalists here was not in the police acting as police, but in the police refusing to act as police. If the capitalists are threatened by this, then their well-being consists in its opposite, which is the police acting as the police. This demonstrates that, insofar as the police are police, they exist in opposition to labour, and can so be considered a section of capital. Only in their refusal to act as police do they break from capital, and, as Ravachol says, only by abandoning that function altogether do they offer a revolutionary opposition to it.


A worker is a worker because of her/his relationship to the means of production. Police do not own or control the means of production in the United States. They are forced by economic circumstances and their own powerlessness to produce what the capitalists want produced, just as all workers are.Class isn't about the relationships of individualise to the means of production, it's about the relationships of individuals to other individuals; that these individuals are mediated by commodities is simply the mystifying effect of market relations, which marks analyses in his discussions of commodity fetishism. As such, the police cannot be understood in terms of its relationship to any given quantity of property, but in the role they play in the process of production. That role, like that of the state more generally, is the mediation of labour and capital with the intent of preserving labour and capital as such, which is to say preserving capitalism. This leads us to the conclusion, again, that the sole anti-capitalist capacity of the police is their capacity for self-dissolution, so if any individual officer wants to be taken seriously as members of a working class-for-itself, then we have to demand that he hands in his badge.

[RedSquare]

That is disgusting.

It's incredible that a person could do this type of thing to another, even more incredible is the fact that no one has been prosecuted or spoke out about it. According to Fox, the man was a tourist as well, so there's not even the whole criminal-known-to-police argument, and was mentally ill and vulnerable at the time of his arrest and detention, not surprising the jail's medical staff are run by a private company (http://news.injuryboard.com/pepper-sprayed-man-dies-in-jail-what-happened-to-nick-christie-.aspx?googleid=277120). That means this was either intentionally done by a completely dehumanized monster or an absolute moron with no comprehension of the consequences of their actions.

The lawyer summed it up for me perfectly:


“Humanity has failed here. And now they aren’t going to address the failure. Us as a people, we need to recognize we’ve all failed and make it right, not ‘Let’s just move on from this failure.’ People shouldn’t do this to people. Nothing could warrant the treatment and death this guy experienced.


"A 62-yr-old retiree strapped to a chair and died. I don’t get it



More worrying is that fact, as has been mentioned, that you only hear about this type of thing through RevLeft.

[NoOneIsIllegal]

In the last week:
- Police beat and shoot striking oil workers in Kazakhstan
- A man casually jokes to an off-duty cop at a bar that he "sucks at darts" in which the pig immediately pops 3 bullets into the innocent man.
- Police strip a man naked, tie him to a chair, gag him, and pepper spray him to death. His crime? Being publicly intoxicated.

...Are liberals still saying their on OUR side?

[Ocean Seal]

In the last week:
- Police beat and shoot striking oil workers in Kazakhstan
- A man casually jokes to an off-duty cop at a bar that he "sucks at darts" in which the pig immediately pops 3 bullets into the innocent man.
- Police strip a man naked, tie him to a chair, gag him, and pepper spray him to death. His crime? Being publicly intoxicated.

...Are liberals still saying their on OUR side?
Yes, and this makes it plainly obvious that liberals like the police are not on the side of workers :thumbup1:.

[RadioRaheem84]

Yes, and this makes it plainly obvious that liberals like the police are not on the side of workers :thumbup1:.

Liberals like the police because they believe in instutional legitimacy. More so than the rabid right wingers which think they're useless and need to be abolished.

Institutional legitimacy is the foundation of all liberal political thought. That the system overall is fine, it's just been corrupted or needs to be reformed.

The problem isn't the the institution of the police force but that the institution needs some sort of reform or needs to weed out the "bad apples".