Cops are the Real Terrorists :: A Dispatch from the Neoliberal Police State of Philadelphia ::

 I love my city. I love its people. But the government of my city has made the people the enemy.

If the behavior of our police and their so-called "union," the FOP, is any indication, there is no line they will not cross, including using, for propaganda purposes, the child of a person they brutalized and terrorized.

During the protests this week, a 28-year old Black woman named Rickia Young, fearing for the safety of her teenage nephew, drove to pick him up from a friend's house. She took her toddler with her because she couldn't leave the child alone. She was being responsible. She was looking out for her family, knowing the dangers that lurk here for Black people.

Rickia, a home health aid and mother, was caught in her SUV between protesters and the police. They police told her to turn around. While she was making a K-turn, as the police directed her to do, the police swarmed her car and dragged her and her teenage nephew out of the vehicle. The woman and the teenager were brutalized by the police, and detained prior to being taken to a hospital. They were also separated from Rickia's toddler.

What happened next reveals the true face of policing in Philadelphia. The child was picked up by a police officer, and a photo was taken of the officer holding the child. Then, the FOP (Fraternal Order of Police, which is not in fact a union, but rather a fraternal order with a bargaining contract) posted this picture on their social media platform, claiming the child was found wandering barefoot and implying parental neglect.

Rickia was Black in the wrong place and the wrong time. Her teenage nephew and her child were Black at the wrong place and the wrong time. These days, that time and place seems to be the entire country. It was probably always that way, but I didn't know it when I was younger.

Rickia was not "looting" or even protesting. She was not even charged with a crime. Her child was separated from her by force, by the police, who then used a picture of the child for "copaganda."

The police are the real terrorists. They brutalized and terrorized this family. And as always, Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, who oversaw the police in Portland when they openly collaborated  with White Supremacist gangs during clashes with protesters several years ago, spoke up after the fact. Outlaw is new to Philadelphia, but she has a history of overseeing cops who deploy excessive and indiscriminate violence against protesters and non-protesting civilians, and who collaborate with white supremacists. We saw this in June when a white supremacist mob of vigilantes beat up a journalist and another civilian in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia, after curfew, while the cops watched and did nothing.

Neighborhoods in my city are being tear gassed. I smelled it in the air this week, wafting in from 52nd Street, when I took a walk to help me sleep better, because I now dread the sound of the low-flying helicopters oppressively hovering over my neighborhood. Philadelphia has one of the highest rates of childhood asthma of any city in the country, and among children with asthma in Philadelphia, Black children are significantly overrepresented. Many of these children live in the primarily Black neighborhoods being tear gassed. There was tear gas deployed in June, too, and rubber bullets, and the National Guard, and now this city's people are being once again declared the enemy of Capital, of Private Property, and the Racist, Neoliberal Police State.

We in Philadelphia are traumatized. We are terrified. We fear for the safety of our families, our neighbors, our coworkers, and for those of us in the caring professions, the people we serve.

To quote a great moral warrior, "The line must be drawn here. This far, and no further." (Picard, Star Trek: First Contact.)

I am living in a neoliberal police state that sees the people as the enemy.

There are lines I am willing to cross in the fight for freedom against racism and capitalism, but using children as propaganda, and hurting innocent people, and separating them from their children, are not among them.

Police are the protectors of private property. Human life is a secondary concern to them, because only humans, war and natural disasters can threaten private property, and the police have no power to arrest a war or a natural disaster. So they make us the enemy. They brutalize, terrorize and murder the people.

They call in the National Guard and they call that "mutual aid." That's beyond appropriation. It's Orwellian Newspeak.

The city and the media are pushing a narrative about election unrest, but that's not what has people here enraged. Not at all. Almost none of the people protesting in my city give two fucks about Biden Vs. Trump. They mostly agree with me that Trump is a symptom of a disease called Late Stage Capitalism. No election in the United States has ended or ever could end racism or the capitalist system that sustains it. It takes grassroots organizing and direct action to fight racism and end capitalism. It takes a bottom-up kind of democracy, the democratization of daily life. I call that democratization Anarchism. Anarchism is democracy in its purest form. And this "election unrest" narrative is extremely self-serving of the Democratic Party, which dominates local politics here. A "blue" city can be just as racist as a "red" city. It's not about red or blue. It's about racism and anti-racism.

People are in my city are not "rioting" over the election. Our concerns are entirely local. We want the city to be more compassionate and less violent. We want the city to house the homeless and stop murdering Black people. We want the Neoliberal Police State that is Philadelphia to repent and renounce intimidation and violence as a means of maintaining the social order. And Fuck The Social Order, too. It needs to be upended, anyway. No presidential election will do that. This is not about Donald Fucking Trump. It is about the history of racism and capitalism.

Racism and Capitalism will forever be linked because the most valuable and lucrative private property in our shameful history were human chattel. And let no one tell you that slavery was "ended." It was not. The Constitution makes allowances for slavery, as a form of punishment in the penal system, where Black people are disproportionately overrepresented, and many of those people are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes. For example, white people are more likely to use or distribute marijuana than Black people. But more Black people are incarcerated for marijuana-related charges. The decriminalization of marijuana in my city didn't significantly impact this.

Black overrepresentation is a problem in the child welfare system, too. It's not because Black people are more violent or criminal than white people or that Black parents are more neglectful and abusive than white parents. The reason is because they have always been under more scrutiny by the capitalist State. Even if you go out into mostly white counties where Black people are not almost half the population, like Montgomery, Chester, or Bucks, Black people are still overrepresented in these punitive systems. So population doesn't account for this. The city's demographics, which include a significant Black population- and a rare, healthy Black middle class- don't account for this.

During my first semester in my social work masters' program, I learned that every year, since 1954, the Supreme Court has sent investigators to Philly's schools. The reason for this is that we still have a segregated school system. My city never actually implemented Brown Vs. Board of Education. The Supreme Court has no power to enforce that 1954 ruling. All they can do is send investigators who report back to the court that Philly is still out of compliance.

Philadelphia, as I mentioned, is one of a handful of American cities with a healthy Black middle class (although that health has taken some hits in recent years, due to economic disparities within the middle class). We are solidly blue with only token Republicans (only 2 Republicans sit on our current city council). Republicans really haven't had any power here in a long time. Our Democratic Party likes to pat themselves on the back like typical self-congratulatory faux-woke liberals and "progressives." But we are one of the most racist cities on the East Coast, if not in the entire country.

The aforementioned police commissioner is a Black woman. But she self-identifies as Blue before Black. All of my Black comrades would say the same thing I am saying. No one here except racist white people and a few minority tokens actually like or trust Danielle Outlaw. This is how a neoliberal capitalist police state functions: with illusion and deflection. "Our Commissioner of Police is Black. How can we be racist?"

But if recent events have proved anything, this is a lie. And this should surprise no one. We are the city that, in 1985, bombed a Black neighborhood and destroyed sixty-five homes to get at one Black activist group, in one house, that consisted of only thirteen people, eight adults and five children.

This country has been at war with Blackness since its inception.

And if we in Philadelphia can't get it together, what hope does the rest of the country have?

This country was born in Philadelphia. And it is dying here.

I say, Let It Die. Burn the plantation state. Salt the Earth where slave-cotton once grew, and where Overseers still police human property.

Like the man said, The Line Must Be Drawn Here.

(Patrick Stewart is an anti-capitalist, by the way, and I'm pretty sure he would agree with me.)

The Informant

The Informant

 

By Raven Green

 

(Author's Note: My apologies to the Leftist community and to the incredible work of police abolitionists for the sympathetic cop in this story... just remember, there's a reason it's called "speculative" fiction.)

The Triangulum Galaxy…

Sometime in the 427^th century…

 

It’s different now. But when I was just a kid, we weren’t all workers. There were different kinds of people, back then. There still are, but we’re all supposed to be equal now. That wasn’t always so. We used to take it is a given that equality could not exist. That to force it was to rob our freedom. It was confusing. Especially for me. I knew I wasn’t like other people.

It’s hard to explain. Even for me, and I remember it. What I remember was their laughter. Not that you always heard it. They were too polite to laugh in public. But there was a dry, sardonic tone in their voices when they appealed to us like we were brothers, before reminding us that rent was due, and if we didn’t have it for them, we’d be without a roof and walls and beds.

There aren’t any more of them. They either defected, to our side, or they were killed when they proved there was no such thing as neutral. It was war, and war was different.

War was easier. There were rules, and if you didn’t follow the rules, you were dead, or useless, and they’d send you home. I was good at staying alive and being useful.

It’s just hard to get used to things changing. But if you keep your mind open, sometimes, you find help where you don’t expect it.

 

The constable who came to the building to meet with me last week was not happy to get another call from me about the same matter.

“I thought we talked about this,” he said, in thin-lipped grimness, while seated at the wooden table I’d made for my kitchen, affably drinking the tea I had steeped and mixed with thick, warm cream.

“Oh, but, Constable… you said it wouldn’t be an issue anymore,” I reminded him. He did say that last time he was here.

“No, that’s not what I said,” said the Constable. “I said, ‘it’s not an issue.’”

“I thought that meant you’d do something about it,” I said.

“In fact, it meant the opposite,” the Constable said. But I did not understand. I looked at him with my mouth open in shock.

“They are violating our laws,” I said. “You’re police. You’re supposed to stop them.”

“Do you drink, Leonid?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. The last time I had alcohol, I was just a young kid. New meat, a green soldier, too fresh, trying to fit in with the hardened brothers and sisters in my unit. This was different. This was supposed to be a community. I didn’t like the drink then, when I took it to be like my comrades, and now that I lived alone, I had no reason to try it again. I didn’t understand why my neighbors did it. It interfered with love, and work- not that I knew much about love. But I knew it wasn’t healthy. It didn’t show respect for the body, and if you weren’t respecting yourself, that usually meant you weren’t respecting other people. They taught us that in the Army of Our Collective Liberation. Officially, the New Order didn’t approve of alcohol. Officially, they didn’t want to be lifestyle police, either. They’d seen how other planets tried it- the repression, the reactionary tendencies seeping in to where they couldn’t be managed- and the same old violence, again and again. So, they limited the alcohol content of liquor to under four percent. But people wanted more than that, which was why there was so much bootlegging. I knew they wanted it stronger, that was why they made it themselves, but I didn’t understand why they wanted to be drunk all the time. I never wanted to be drunk again.

The Constable caught me in silent thought. He had not said a word as I processed all this, merely leaned back and sipped more tea, then pressed his lips together in a warm but toothless smile. I’d like to think that my father would have smiled at me that way, if he had lived, but the town where I was born no longer existed. When the New Order made the landholders cede us the property, they threatened them, said they’d hurt them if anything happened to the workers on the land. But then, satisfied with their intimidation, they left, and the former owners decided, if the land couldn’t be theirs, then it would belong to no one. My father had sent me for milk that morning. I was pedaling the bike that pulled the jug cart over the Little Creek Bridge when I saw the flames rising from the black, charred remains of our cottage. My father was a bootlegger, in those days, when only the richest had money for liquor. He kept a still in the house. It must have exploded with the firebombs. I could smell the burn of ethanol in the air as I rode, horrified, to the ruins of my childhood home. I remembered… almost. I shut it out. I returned to the moment, to the table, and the Constable, and his tea.

“Please don’t leave yet,” I said. “Stay with me?”

The Constable chuckled warmly, and he reached his hand across the table. He laid his palm on mine and pressed down, giving me that sense of tension and pressure he knew I needed sometimes.

“My husband would worry about me,” he said. “He hates to sleep alone, too. I’m asking that you not call the constabulary again unless someone is getting hurt, or abandoned, or mistreated. Some things, you don’t need police for them. You work it out as a community, and if no one gets hurt, it’s okay. It’s really okay.”

“They’re hurting themselves,” I said.

“These people have jobs. They have families. If their lives were falling apart from drink, I’d know. I’d be getting calls from this building, not just from you. Do you understand me, Leonid? They’re making a choice and it’s theirs. It’s not yours. You don’t get to decide how they cope.”

“Things aren’t that bad,” I said.

“They’re getting better,” he agreed. “I believe they’ll keep getting better. It’s good to see young people having pride again. We didn’t have that when I was your age.”

I was twenty. He must have been forty-five, or more. But we’d both been discharged from the Army of Our Collective Liberation only a little more than a year ago. He had been a policeman before. He went back to the constabulary after discharge. I became an assistant clerk at the Hall of Records. I was good at keeping track of facts. For a year, I’d had what they called “normal life.” An apartment. A job. The same maglev ride every day to the beautiful city center, with its spires rising like spears of glass, that caught the glints of two red suns looming overhead. I liked going to the city center. It reminded me of the virtual trance technique they used to put us through in the Army, where we could walk in Paradise, a respite from the sound of guns. Paradise looked like this: smooth, sharp crystal towers of a promised future rising over the barren plains and murky swamps of the past.

I still remembered, with pride, the transmission we heard around the world, when our allies’ warships finally arrived in the sky:

“The people of this planet have spoken. We have answered their call. They tried democracy your way. It failed. Now you will try democracy their way. And history will be your judge. You have forty-eight hours to begin an adequate program of wealth redistribution and agro-industrial collectivizing, or we will bombard every military facility we can identify on our scanners with high-speed railgun projectiles. And then, we will target your financial institutions. There is your choice. We’ll be back, either way. We’re watching.”

The world had changed that day. Just a little, but it was enough. A crack of the door, letting in the light.

But the Constable said, “It doesn’t change all at once, you know. Old habits die hard. You can’t expect people to divorce their past with a clean slate overnight.” He shrugged. “It was a complicated and messy relationship. So they drink, because they’re not as certain as you and me, Leonid. They didn’t go to war. They didn’t fight for the revolution. They had to stay behind, run the factories and farms while young people like you were dying. So they hate themselves, you see? They think they didn’t do enough. We should try to understand their faults instead of punishing them. After all, they’re not the problem, not really. The bootlegging is just the symptom of a disease. I went to Food Distro yesterday, Leonid, and there was meat in the butcher’s window again. Real meat. The good times are coming back, but this time, they’re for everyone. Not just the people on top. You have to be patient. And try to make friends. Be part of this. Be a good neighbor. And if you need to talk, you know where to call me, but I don’t want to hear about what’s going on in the apartment next door, or above you, or down the hall. I do want to know what’s going on with you.”

He finished the tea and slid the ceramic vessel my way.

“Thank you,” he said. “For being my host tonight, comrade.”

“Thank you for… just thank you,” I said, still not understanding much of what he’d said. I would have to think long and hard about how it all applied. But I knew I wasn’t abandoned. He would be there for me if I needed him.

He was more than twice my age, but we had a bond, ever since we’d stepped off different helicopters, same day, same landing pad. Same hometown, at least, the closest town to the burned homestead where I was from. The Uleks, the former landowners, had been driven out while I was a continent away. I never went back there anymore. It wasn’t my home now. There was nothing left there to cherish or remember. Nothing personal. Just the grey-orange sky and the green-brown fields rolling off into a horizon dotted by tiny, distant bushy sticks. I didn’t want the memories, if they were still there. It was best to stay away, to focus on the future, not on what was taken, and could never be regained. In the five years I fought, I never thought of home. I convinced myself it no longer existed, and that I was fighting for something else- for a piece of the enemy, like a smear of blood, or a torn and muddied piece of uniform. Some token to prove the struggle was real, that it wasn’t all just a horrible dream of marching and falling to the ground, and listening, with my eyes closed, while my comrades died around me.

He was right. My life was here now. I had to relax and be a good neighbor.

He glanced at his wristie. It must have been late. I wasn’t wearing mine, but I could feel the lateness of the hour. I yawned; my eyes ached for rest.

He put on his thick grey coat and closed the door behind him. Through the door, I could hear him moving on the floorboards covered by the thin carpet, toward the ancient, creaking, cage of an elevator in the building’s south wing. He was gone now, and I had to find something else to focus on, or all the other sounds would become too overwhelming: Comrade Likush in 5A, tapping his pipe clear on a metal ashtray; Comrade Ilya, Apartment 4B, strumming her quarter-lyre; the children, in 4C, arguing with their mother over bedtime. All the sounds I couldn’t shut out conspired to keep me awake for fitful hours until finally exhaustion won out and I slept for a mere two before the alarm clock on my bedside buzzed me awake. It felt like no time had passed, like I’d simply closed my eyes, and opened them again. But the twin red suns were above the horizon, their light filtering through the particles of the atmosphere to make day.