Oppose Police Terror against Aboriginal People, “Ethnic” Youth And All The Poor!
Don’t Allow Business as Usual – Build Mass Actions Backed by Trade Union Power!
May 11 – Enough is enough! How many more mothers and fathers must grieve over a child killed by Australian police? How many more close friends must agonise over a dear one whose life hangs in the balance because they were attacked by cops? Police are getting ever more vicious. They must be opposed! Recent events have made this all too clear.
On March 21, six Sydney cops viciously killed Brazilian student Roberto Laudisio. After having identified Roberto as having allegedly stolen, of all things, a packet of biscuits, the cops hounded him as if he was the target of a hunting expedition. They smashed him against a shop window, capsicum sprayed him and then, in what resembled an horrific game of cat and mouse, repeatedly tasered him to death.
Less than two weeks later, NSW cops were at it again. They opened fire at point blank range on Aboriginal youth in Kings Cross. After shooting two teenagers, police brutally dragged their victims out of the car that they were in. One of them was 17-year old Troy Taylor. Police had shot him in the neck. Now they barbarically bashed him as he lay helpless on the edge of death in a pool of his own blood. Despite the best efforts of Liberal premier O’Farrell and the mainstream media, much of the public has been horrified at this Nazi-like savagery. Yet this is hardly the exception. Since 1980, over 500 Indigenous people have died in state custody. And over the last few years, a startling number of people of all ethnicities have died at the hands of police.
With Australian police so trigger-happy, anyone could potentially be the next victim. Yet there is also a definite bias. The authorities target, in the first place, Aboriginal people and after that working class non-white ethnic youth and more broadly poorer people of all colours. Look at the difference between the way police treated the Aboriginal youth in Kings Cross, who had allegedly mounted onto a footpath in a stolen car, and the way the authorities treated the late tycoon Dick Pratt. Pratt had stolen not a mere car but 700 million dollars from ordinary people by forming an illegal cartel to set rip-off prices on packaging (for everyday items) sold by his firm, Visy. Yet when Pratt was finally charged, he was not gunned down by the authorities. Instead the elite rushed to his defence. Then when he developed cancer, the police did not brutally bash him as he fought for his life. Instead, politicians fell over themselves to visit the ailing capitalist bigwig and prosecutors even dropped all charges against him. After his death, the filthy, greedy criminal was given a state funeral! It’s one law for some, one law for others!
The fact is that the police, alongside the courts, prisons and army, form part of a rich people’s state, a capitalist state. Although it may occasionally put a real murderer or rapist in jail, the state’s main job is to protect the rich capitalist business elite from any revolt by the working class masses that they exploit. Even in times when the masses’ struggles are quieter, the state is busy evicting poor tenants struggling to pay rent, harassing the homeless and amplifying racist government policies by picking on Aboriginal people and also African, Asian and Middle Eastern youth. Doing such dirty “work” day in day out, police develop a hostile attitude to those doing it hardest in our society. And they just keep getting worse! That’s because governments – whether Liberal, ALP or ALP/Greens in coalition – are allowing the very rich to get richer at the expense of the poor. Look at the way Gillard has slashed the parenting payments for low-income single mothers. Such vicious policies encourage the police, who enforce the ever more unequal status quo, to become even more contemptuous towards those stuck at the bottom of an unjust society.
That is why we must build defiant mass actions against this tyranny. We must demand that the cops who killed Roberto and who brought two youths in the Kings Cross incident to the brink of death must be jailed. Justice for TJ Hickey and all victims of state violence! Most of all our actions, which need to be backed up by the power of the united working class, must be strong enough to make the authorities realize that if they don’t rein in their cops, there will be consequences. It won’t be business as usual! In particular, trade union industrial action can hit the profits of the business elite who run this country hard and make them start to understand that they’ll be hit in the hip pocket if their cops continue with their terror.
This struggle is urgent because when the capitalist economic crisis, centered in Europe, does arrive here then the state will become even more brutal. The capitalist rulers will make the masses pay for the crisis and they will mobilise their state to try and crush any fight back. The violence that cops have dealt to the Occupy Sydney demonstrators will be unleashed on a greater scale. That is what riot police are doing in places like Greece and Spain as the masses resist the poverty imposed by the exploiting elite. In 2008, Greek police murdered 15 year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos when they opened fire on protesters.
That’s why it’s in the very interest of the workers movement to stand by those most targeted by police today. For it is the same state that’s hounding the most downtrodden groups that will be used to attack workers’ picket lines and jail trade union militants when the workers’ struggle hots up. Furthermore, only by standing with Aboriginal people and embattled “ethnic” communities can the working class movement undercut the schemes of the rulers to divide their ranks with racism.
That some workers can come to understand this was shown by the stance of the Sydney branch of the MUA dock workers union in support of Aboriginal hero Lex Wotton. Wotton was the leader of the 2004 resistance by the people of Palm Island that responded to the racist police murder of Mulrunji Doomadgeee. That 100% justified resistance saw the centres of racist tyranny on the island, the police station and court, end up in ashes. The MUA Sydney Branch was won over to joining a burgeoning campaign to defend Wotton from persecution. This culminated in a stopwork by all Sydney port workers on 7 November 2008 on the day Wotton was sentenced by a Townsville Court. This union action was instrumental in making the authorities realise that the masses would not let them get away with imposing on Wotton the extreme jail sentence that they had wanted.
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A key part of this agenda is to have the Police Association removed from Unions NSW. It is the duty of all socialists to fight for this. It is very hard to mobilise trade union support for campaigns against cop violence when we’ve got police representatives at our union meetings! It is thus not good enough for some Left groups to only denounce the cops where that is popular and then, in another setting, claim it’s a positive that, for instance, cops joined last year’s NSW public sector workers’ rallies.
No Illusions in Any State Inquiries – “Independent” Or Not! No Illusions in Reforming The Police!
If we are going to direct the anger at police violence into the kind of struggle that can actually make the cops think twice before unleashing their terror, it is crucial that people do not get diverted into false hopes that the police force can actually be made to alter its character. Yet such hopes are widespread, even among those working hard to organize actions to respond to the Kings Cross outrage. Thus, one of the demands of the May 12 protest is for a police citizens review board. However, the police force which has been built up over many years for the express purpose of maintaining our unfair social order cannot be controlled by any review board. All such boards will serve to do is to give a pretence that the police are under the public’s control. In the U.S. where such civilian review boards exist, terrible cop violence against Blacks, Hispanics and the poor continues unabated.
What is widely understood is that when police investigate themselves this always leads to a whitewash. Yet people are instead calling for an “independent inquiry.” The trouble with that is that any inquiry conducted by the state will not be in any shape or form actually “independent.” It will be an inquiry conducted by an institution that serves the same ruling class as do the cops. That is why when there was a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, that “independent inquiry” failed to bring charges against a single murderous cop. What positive recommendations it did make have since not even been implemented.
Most of those calling for an “independent inquiry” are motivated by a sincere yearning for justice for the victims of police violence. But others have other ulterior aims too. Thus, Greens politician David Shoebridge’s calls for an “independent inquiry” are in good part aimed at restoring public faith in the police and in quelling determined opposition to the state. He made that clear at the April 24 protest when he reprimanded youth there for using “violent language” against the police. How dare he! Police heinously bashed children right after shooting them and this Greens politician complains about people’s hostile language to the police!
Yet whether illusions in state inquiries are promoted by cynical politicians or by those with noble intentions, their effect is to undercut the fight to build the type of actions that can actually deter the cops. One of the reasons that the campaign to defend Lex Wotton was able to lead on to union industrial action is that the Sydney-based campaign avoided making calls for a state inquiry into the case and thereby ensured that it did not dull its participants’ sense that they must rely only on the power of the masses.
We need, today, the kind of action that the port workers took in defence of Lex Wotton but on a much larger scale. That is what it will take to begin to push back the rampaging police. In the end, those at risk of being hit with state violence will only truly be safe when this racist, capitalist state is swept away and replaced with a state serving the interests of working class people.
This aim of socialist revolution is what we should be guided by. Yet we can only prepare for this final goal in the course of waging struggles today. So beware those who use the necessity of a “long term working class strategy” as a means to dampen today the militancy of youth. A genuine working class-centred outlook seeks not to discourage resistance but to mobilise the working class behind staunch actions that embattled youth may take – such as if they organised mass pickets around particular police stations. We must combine the courage and determination of the embattled youth seen, for example, in the 2004 Redfern resistance struggle (that responded to the police murder of TJ Hickey) with the power of the organised workers movement. Let us win justice for all victims of racist and anti-working class police violence!