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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People, Not ‘Serve and Protect’
from In These Times:
The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People, Not Serve and Protect
BY SAM MITRANI
In most of the liberal discussions of the recent police killings of unarmed black men, there is an underlying assumption that the police are supposed to protect and serve the population. That is, after all, what they were created to do.
If only the normal, decent relations between the police and the community could be re-established, this problem could be resolved. Poor people in general are more likely to be the victims of crime than anyone else, this reasoning goes, and in that way, they are in more need than anyone else of police protection. Maybe there are a few bad apples, but if only the police werent so racist, or didnt carry out policies like stop-and-frisk, or werent so afraid of black people, or shot fewer unarmed men, they could function as a useful service that we all need.
This liberal way of viewing the problem rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police and what they were created to do.
The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid- to late-19th century from the threat posed by that systems offspring, the working class.
This is a blunt way of stating a nuanced truth, but sometimes nuance just serves to obfuscate. ...............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17505/police_and_poor_people
Jackpine Radical
(45,274 posts)You can take it beyond the police, too.
Madison said of government that its function is "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority."
But one shouldn't be too hard on the old boy. He also said,
Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)recall where. I'd seen various shows that had noted how police were used as private armies against labour by robber baron types, but not really anything that showed how ubiquitous the notion was that 'police' were there to stomp on protestors, whether they were protesting against horrible labour practices, starvation, slavery, or anything else. They were almost exclusively in existence to try to keep the lower classes from inconveniencing the 'owner' class in any way.
The 'defense of property rights' is a pretty blatant example. When a poor person is robbed, the police show up, take a few notes, tell them to lock up better, and leave. And nothing happens. (Well, if multiple such robberies occur in an area, a patrol car might be sent to drive around a bit more often for a while.) The more money or property taken, the richer the person robbed, the greater response and actual attempts to 'solve' the crime.
And when a poor person robs a rich person, they spend years in a dangerous, poorly run prison. But when a rich person robs thousands or even millions of poor people, they go to a 'minimum security' prison, if they are even ever arrested in the first place.
Our entire legal system is set up to protect the rich from the rest of us. Any protection for the rest of us from each other is purely incidental, and any protection for the rest of us from the rich is so rare as to be astonishing, since most of what they do is 'perfectly legal'.