The real " FAR LEFT " view of the police

Friend or Foe? Marxism and the Police

[ Political events regularly tend to bring the question of the role of the police in society to the fore. In the period heading up to the September 11 attack, a rash of police brutality cases throughout the world had created a situation where many important cities where rocked by protests against general police violence or individual rogue cops. Since then, under a heavy barrage of bourgeois patriotic propaganda, police have been literally promoted as self-sacrificing defenders of civilisation and every poor orphan and grandmother on the planet. Liberal and even radical "copwatch" activity is at low ebb; ironically perhaps nowhere more than in New York City, previously the site of a good number of large police violence protests. ⁽¹⁾ Open pro-police propaganda is having a real effect.

That the role of police is regularly brought to the centre of things is testimony to the crucial and apparently contradictory role they play in this society. Within the line of their work, they accomplish some seemingly positive things. For example, they may break up fights, arrest insane serial killers and if we are to believe modern televised mythology, help fragile old people cross hazardous city street corners. Then again, any striking worker that has had to deal with them knows they always defend the bosses interests, anybody who has any knowledge of the judicial system knows that they literally all lie under oath and anybody who was brought up in a poor working class neighbourhood has witnessed or experienced their abuse. Of course capitalists, politicians and media propagandists refer only to the former activities to actively promote the police in any way they can. Copwatch liberals and other critical apologists for the police will generally dismiss the latter activities and denounce "isolated cases", rogue cops and call for community control commissions or enquiries on individual incidents.

Both of these analyses are of absolutely no help in identifying what is the role of the police in this society and thus what attitude the working class and revolutionaries must adopt towards them. The question is not professionalism or abuse. The issue is not "good cop versus bad cop". This is an attempt to whitewash the role of police in society based solely on emotional and moralistic definitions. Trying to understand a political institution by analysing one person at a time is like trying to understand the geology of a sector by analysing a few grains of sand or a few shovels of dung. There can of course be nice individuals that happen to be cops. They might even be agreeable neighbours or relatives. But that is totally irrelevant. ]