Demilitarize, Disarm, Disband: If the Leaders Support the Police Then They Are Part of the Problem

We have a serious problem in this country (many, actually) that is police terrorism against black communities and POC. You know, it’d be one thing if the system was set up to protect people from unaccountable violence from people in positions of authority. But that’s not the case.

In support of this deeply embedded and terrifying problem of racialized police violence, is the representative political process of managers to whom people appeal for nominal changes and reforms to at very least, please and thank you, *hold accountable* killer police.

Mainstream organizations who want status, recognition, funding or negotiating power for those “accountability reforms” tend to shy away from more structural changes like demilitarization, disarming the police, abolishing the police or banning them from particular communities pending structural changes toward restorative “justus”. Because we might have to discuss what that actually means if the power structure does not “choose” to disarm, demilitarize or disband a failed strategy (for non-whites) of organized policing and occupation. But while this debate happens, and the people in power pay lip service to the oppressed rising tide of black power, we should look at the meaningful effects of reform as it is practiced.

In Los Angeles the police union just successfully negotiated a 8.2% pay increase over the next 3 years including over-time. Forget the lawsuit pending over a brutal sexual attack by Olympic Division police against a woman of color in Koreatown who was thrown from a police vehicle trying to escape and suffered major injuries. Or the murder of a man in Pomona just last week at the hands of an LAPD officer now fired to save the department from having to address it’s institutionalized violence.

In Arizona this week the Senate approved a bill to protect the identities of police involved in executions and serious shootings for at least 60 days meaning that we will need to investigate the police OURSELVES and determine justus OURSELVES.

This is not a power structure that is levying pressure against the police to take seriously the cries of the oppressed, surviving family members of executed people at the hands of cops or victims of police brutality and state repressive violence.

Again, the people in power are in support of the problem (which is POLICING of poor communities of color most targeted by white supremacy, anti blackness, capitalism and so many other violently enforced hierarchies). The organization of the police and the local city and national government are intertwined to an inseparable degree. So let’s be clear, when we are asking for reform how does that reform actually comes down. If they won’t actually reform away from institutionalized interests of police power, then they must be disarmed (at least). Either way the casualties of this white supremacist for-profit property-over-black-life system has got to stop.

If they don’t disarm, what does our own ‘intervention’ to stop police violence actually look like? If they don’t demilitarize, what does organizing for self defense actually look like? If they don’t disband, what do we need to do to organize a force capable of keeping our comrades and extended communities from their prisons and early graves?

Would this mass unrest and support of black rebellion and self defense result in anything other than catastrophic violence at the hands of the state and it’s police agents? If there is such a period of heightened conflict and violence, is that not also a reason to prepare for revolutionary war?