The Cops Showed You Who They Are Yesterday
Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
To Protect and Serve is a nice thought, and good branding as well, but between Amazon and the Batman villain-esque perp walk for Luigi Mangione, the New York Police Department provided a lot of clarity yesterday as to who the police protect and serve in our capitalist society—namely, capital.
Believe it or not, but the cops are not legally obliged to protect and serve the people, as Ramenda Cyrus detailed for The American Prospect after the 2022 New York City Sunset Park subway shooting that injured at least ten people. She pointed to two Supreme Court cases, The Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005) and Deshaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services (1989), which have established that “the police do not have to act if someone is actively being harmed, they do not have to arrest someone who has violated orders, and they do not have any obligation to protect you from others.”
But if workers are striking at Amazon and scabs need help crossing the picket line? Well, then that’s what the NYPD is there for. To arrest people fighting capitalists for a living wage.
At the scene of the Amazon strike:
The NYPD has now erected barricades to allow Amazon contractors to enter and leave the distribution center, helping Amazon break the picket line.
— Hell Gate *subscribe today!* (@hellgatenyc.com) December 19, 2024 at 9:18 AM
from what I can tell, the NYPD just arrested this driver for trying to join the strike. a cop then got in his vehicle and drove it away pic.twitter.com/EL6eOyasdo
— Alex Press (@alexnpress) December 19, 2024
In case you weren’t fully convinced that the police in American society exist to protect capital from the people, the alleged CEO murderer who has inspired a violent rhetorical uprising against capital, Luigi Mangione, got the full-blown Joker treatment from the NYPD, parading a man with a debilitating back injury around in front of an army for the cameras that definitely didn’t reinforce the us versus them point his mildly incoherent manifesto was trying to make. CNN’s Brynn Gingras said she had “never seen anything like this” show of force for one perp walk. That was a crystal-clear message being sent by the police to the people of who they prioritize in protecting.
There was also this utterly heartbreaking and enraging video that surfaced yesterday which really drove home the point that the police are not obligated to or even interested in helping vulnerable people, as an unhoused woman was going into labor and Louisville police told her she was “being detained for unlawfully camping.” This is what a dying empire looks like.
Unless you own private property, the American state is simply not your ally and in cases like this unhoused woman, is actively your enemy. The United States has been an aristocracy by design from the very beginning, and all our talk about freedom is mostly just propaganda designed to create a public perception that the cops and the American state are on our side. They’re not. FBI data has long shown that American cops are bad at their alleged primary jobs, solving crimes, as Jeffrey Young wrote for The Huffington Post in 2020:
It’s all right there in the FBI’s official crime data. Law enforcement solved less than half ― just 46% ― of violent crimes and just 18% of property crimes in 2017, the most recent year for which numbers are available. Homicides and aggravated assaults were the only types of crime with clearance rates above 50%. They also solved only 35% of rapes, 29% of robberies, 14% of burglaries, 19% of larcenies and 14% of automobile thefts. Other FBI data shows that murder cases are less likely to be solved when the victim is Black.
Police protect and serve capital, not the people, and if these FBI figures, Supreme Court rulings and the stark images out of New York and Louisville yesterday couldn’t convince you of this unimpeachable fact, I’m not quite sure what else could.