CHICAGO—On October 27, 2015, U.S. president Obama gave a speech full of cooning and bootlicking at the annual conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). The IACP meets each year to streamline their methods of oppression.
Imperialist media present the police as if they are a solution to crime. If police were interested in removing drugs from the country, they would be locking up the CIA and FBI, who deliver an uninterrupted supply of heroin and cocaine to the African community.
Africans represent 12 percent of the total population of drug users, but 38 percent of those arrested for drug offenses, and 59 percent of those in state prison for a drug offense. Africans serve virtually as much time in prison for a drug offense (58.7 months) as whites do for a violent offense (61.7 months).
If the African community is to be free of “crime,” then the Black community must be in control, not just a black man on a string, bowing down to the status quo like a puppy begging for a treat from its master. The police in our communities are currently controlled by foreign and hostile interests.
It is the police in the African community, like U.S. soldiers in foreign lands, who carry out the directives of the oppressor and their rule.
Obama’s kisses of death
Obama delivered three main points at the conference.
His first promise was full funding of the police. The imperialist motto is to spare no expense in defense of the empire built on stolen land and relying on stolen labor and resources. The U.S. spends $80 billion each year to keep people locked up.
Obama’s second promise was for “criminal justice reforms that will make the system smarter and fairer.” This was more double-speak and two-faced madness. He didn’t say anything that would make a dent in the one million African people locked up in prison. At most, 6500 people are up for “resentencing” for non-violent drug offences under the current bill in the senate, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act.
Obama also stated that they are working on new policies to “partner with community members.” Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report writes, “It’s a scam, of course. The administration’s version of community policing would actually increase police penetration of the Black community, in the guise of community relations, multiplying the points of contact between police and the people.
Pro-active policing merges with predictive policing, which is racial profiling on steroids. Obama is only seeking to put a smiling face on an even more intrusive, higher tech Mass Black Incarceration State.”
Obama’s third point, “We’ve got to make it harder for criminals to cause chaos by getting their hands on deadly firearms.” In other words, he wants to ensure the African community is unarmed. It is Africans who are labeled criminal by the U.S., when it is the U.S. that is the deadliest gangster in history.
Black Community Control of the Police, not a black puppet licking the boots of the beasts
It is Africans who are being murdered. The police, courts, grand jury and prisons are arms of the State.
The State is necessary when there is a split between those that have and those that do not have. The State protects the monopoly of power and resources of the ruling class.
The U.S. is colonial State, born of slavery and genocide.
The police in the Black community is the same as the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan, or Israel in Palestine.
The police killing African people is not a mistake, it is what it must do to protect the status quo.
African people will not know real freedom until we have defeated colonial State power and replace it with Black people’s State Power in the hands of the African working class.
The African People’s Socialist Party’s Platform point number eight states:
We want the immediate withdrawal of the U.S. police from our oppressed and exploited communities.
We believe that the various U.S. police agencies which occupy our communities are arms of the U.S. colonialist state which is responsible for keeping our people enslaved and terrorized. We believe that the U.S. police agencies do not serve us, but instead represent the first line of U.S. defense against the just struggle of our people for peace, dignity, and socialist democracy. Therefore, we believe the U.S. police is an illegitimate standing army, a colonial army in the African community and must withdraw immediately from our community, to be replaced by our liberation forces whose struggles in defense of our community and against our oppression demonstrate their loyalty to our community and their willingness to serve in its interest.
Self-determination is the highest expression of democracy!
