July 17, 2024 marked ten years since 43-year-old Eric Garner was choked to death by officer Daniel Pantaleo in Staten Island, New York. August 9, 2024, marks ten years since 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed by officer Darren Wilson killed in Ferguson, Missouri.
In the weeks following these murders, thousands of people across the country took to the streets to express outrage and protest the constant police violence faced by Black people.
In reaction to these demonstrations, politicians offered their condolences to the families and promised to address police brutality. Barack Obama announced that the federal government would set aside millions of dollars for body cameras, which were originally created to expand surveillance capacity, not transparency. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo suggested appointing a special prosecutor to handle cases of police brutality. None of this talk brought an end to racist police violence.
In fact, in the years since, people have continued to demonstrate following the deaths of people of color at the hands of police across the country. In 2015, hundreds protested following the killing of Sandra Bland in Hempstead, Texas. In 2016, people took to the streets again to protest the deaths of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana. In 2020, thousands across the United States and the world took to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd, while remembering the murder of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky earlier that year. We saw politicians take the mic, repeat their messages of condolences and make empty promises to address police brutality. But again, no results. And sadly, we have more racist cop murders to prove this: most recently the death of Sonya Massey in Illinois.
Although the protests have not stopped racist police terror, they have pushed the system to make at least a show of justice. The demonstrations for George Floyd led to the arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment of the cops involved. Ordinary people together can have an impact — the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements are examples of this. We can take inspiration from them for our future struggles.
But the constant record of police violence since then also shows we can’t just keep organizing to force politicians to do something about it. They have proven to us again and again that we can’t rely on them. We never can because police violence is a key tool to maintaining the system they serve, capitalism. And racism is a key tool of that system to promote divisions among working people and justify the killing of people of color.
The need for police and the rates of police violence will increase in a world full of precarity, where our basic needs are sacrificed for benefit of the wealthy. We need social and economic safety, which will never be guaranteed under capitalism. The only force we can rely on to change this system and bring about a world without police violence is ourselves. We, the working class, keep this system running and have the power to shut it down. We have the power to create a new society that would truly protect our well-being, by prioritizing our access to quality food, safe and affordable housing, health care and more. This is a world worth fighting for and we all have a role to play!
