Who are the real criminals?

 

 

by Luke Pickrell

I do not care what the police chief has to say, or who the officer was. In the end it doesn't matter. I care about the anger that will turn to determination, the fear that will turn to urgency, and the people who will turn emotions into revolutionary energy. The state executed another person today. It wasn’t done by pumping phenobarbital through his veins; or by launching a Hellfire missile; or by funding a proxy militia force; or by torture; or starvation, or exhaustion, or hunger. First came the speeding cars - sirens blaring. Then the helicopter – camera rolling. Next he was degraded – called a “bad dude.” Finally he was shot. Blood stained his white shirt. The police walked away slowly, guns still trained, and watched him die. See for yourself. Can you hear the heavy-metal soundtrack playing in the background as Terence Crutcher died? 

Much has been made by the corporate media of a bomb that went off in New York. It's called "terrorism" and is being used to numb and condition the masses and justify a massive police exercise. I'll tell you one terrorist threat: this one is armed to the teeth, praised by the president, protected by the courts, valorized in popular culture, and responsible for 3,900 deaths since 2013.  

I'll tell you about something even worse than the police: it's a society - shaped by an economic system - that produces "criminals" for the police to kill and lock away. A society - lorded over by a wealthy elite - that deprives so many the ability to meet their basic needs and leaves many communities so scarred that turning to the police is the safest option.

Said Clarence Darrow to prisoners in a Chicago County Jail

If I looked at jails and crimes and prisoners in the way the ordinary person does, I should not speak on this subject to you. The reason I talk to you on the question of crime, its cause and cure, is because I really do not in the least believe in crime. There is no such thing as a crime as the word is generally understood. I do not believe there is any sort of distinction between the real moral condition of the people in and out of jail. One is just as good as the other. The people here can no more help being here than the people outside can avoid being outside. I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be. They are in jail simply because they can not avoid it on account of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control and for which they are in no way responsible...A great many folks admit that many of the people in jail ought not to be there, and many who are outside ought to be in. I think none of them ought to be here. There ought to be no jails, and if it were not for the fact that the people on the outside are so grasping and heartless in their dealings with the people on the inside, there would be no such institutions as jails.

This is how the police sells themselves to us, by feeding off the brutality of the most brutalized under capitalism. So who are the real criminals in society?