The Police
Only doing their job?

THE TV and the papers portray them as the thin blue line, defending 'normal' people from the hordes of criminals waiting to rob us blind, rape us, or murder us in our beds. The truth is something entirely different.

The fact is that when anti-social crimes like burglary, street robbery and so on are committed against working class women and men, if you phone the police from a working class estate, often they won't show for hours. Black people and women who have been raped or suffer domestic violence find the police incredibly unsympathetic. Many people believe this proves that the police should have more money or power. This conclusion is absolutely wrong because it ignores the fact that the fundamental, main role of the police is not to prevent crime.

The real task of the police is first and foremost to defend the existing social order, and this means repressing resistance to capitalism and its effects. This is what their 'law and order' really means, and it is not in our interests. Therefore they have to disguise this role:

The police need to get the trust of ordinary people, to ensure our day-to-day obedience and co-operation, and also to get us to accept law-and order policies: more power, more weapons and more numbers. To do this, they need to con us into believing that without them crime would explode. The press and politicians, Tory and labour alike, back them in this lie. It is all based on the idea that our communities would be incapable of policing themselves if they were allowed to.

POLICE POWERS

The police are arming themselves up with American batons and CS gas, and there is a strong lobby for the routine carrying of guns.

The gas and baton body count has already begun. Only weeks after these new weapons were introduced onto the streets two black men died at police hands. Brian Douglas was clubbed across the back of the head with a US-style baton. Ibrahima Sey was CS gassed to death inside a police station.

These deaths were not one off's or accidents. Day in day out police dish out harassment to working class and especially black youth, increasingly using the stop and search rights the Criminal Justice Act (CJA) gave them. As in Bradford last spring, when youth rise up against racist harassment their streets are flooded with police and they are attacked. The results of police carrying guns are not hard to predict.

WHO THEY REALLY POLICE

The true role of the police goes much further than systematic harassment and reinforcing racism. It exposes itself most nakedly when the working class and oppressed organise together and fight back.

In 1984 the most militant section of the working class, the miners, fought back in a strike against the hated Tory government who were trying to close the pits. The Tories knew they had to win this fight at any cost. They pumped billions of pounds into the police force and intelligence services.

Thousands of police from London were poured into the pit villages. Pitched battles were fought as police tried to smash picket lines, so they could get scabs in to work and break the strike. The state was determined to smash the miners and they used their police force to help them do it.

And that's not all. The march against the Nazi HQ in Welling and the demonstration against the Criminal Justice Act at Hyde Park were both attacked by a tooled up police force on the instructions of the government.

Against police harassment and their attacks on demos and pickets, we should not turn the other cheek. We need to organise disciplined defence capable of winning when the police attack. On demonstrations, stewarding should be geared to defence and organised enough to resist attack. On pickets, defence squads run by the workers need to be set up to stop the police getting scabs in. Against racist attacks need our own street patrols under the control of committees of local workers and the community. As well as preventing police harassment these patrols could deal more effectively with anti-social crime than the police ever could.

Imagine if a movement, supported by the mass of working people, tried to seriously change the distribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Who would the police side with? The answer is clear. The police are an arm of the state, and when it comes to the crunch the state will always defend the interests of the bosses against the struggles of workers. The state is not neutral and neither are the police. What they do to our demonstrations is nothing compared to what they will do if workers get anywhere near succeeding in a revolution and seizing the property of the bosses. Before we can start building a socialist society the police will have to be broken up and replaced by the armed self-defence of the population.

The police are a real, every day threat to our interests and an obstacle to our socialist goal. This is why we must strip them of their powers, and fight for our right to self-defence -now!

REVOLUTION says:

* Abolish the police

* Abolish the Tactical Support Groups (the bastards in the blue helmets)

* Strip the police of their weapons: no batons, CS gas, riot shields, etc.

* For organised self-defence

* Workers and youth to safegaurd their own areas.

BACK TO THE TOP

Democracy: do we live in a democratic society?

Police: only doing their job?

Police: whose side are they on

State & Revolution

Lesson of Chile