The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People, Not ‘Serve and Protect’

[marmar]

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 weren’t so racist, or didn’t carry out policies like stop-and-frisk, or weren’t 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 system’s 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]

1. I have been saying exactly this for years.

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,

In every political society, parties are unavoidable. A difference of interests, real or supposed, is the most natural and fruitful source of them. The great object should be to combat the evil: 1. By establishing a political equality among all. 2. By withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches. 3. By the silent operation of laws, which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort. 4. By abstaining from measures which operate differently on different interests, and particularly such as favor one interest at the expence of another. 5. By making one party a check on the other, so far as the existence of parties cannot be prevented, nor their views accommodated.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

2. I JUST saw this same point addressed on TV in the last week or so, and I wish I could

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'.

[marmar]

3. afternoon kick

[hobbit709]

4. Their motto leaves out three words-the moneyed class. That's who they serve and protect.