Article by Paul Siegel
Staff Writer, Socialist Action newsmagazine

The Mark Furhman tapes played during the O.J. Simpson trial have dramatically revealed the hate-filled racism, brutality, and corruption that pervades the Los Angeles police force. Furhman described in the tapes how cops routinely arrest [black] people without reason, destroy evidence that would exonerate defendants, plant evidence against them, beat confessions out of them, and give false testimony. Los Angeles politicians and police union officials have attempted to portray Furhman as an aberration, but there is no gainsaying the depth of the corruption and brutality not only of the Los Angeles police, but of the police in the Black communities of Philadelphia, New York, and other major cities of the United States: New Orleans, Atlanta, Jersey City, and Chicago; have recently had their own scandals.

The pattern is the same everywhere-widespread brutality that eventually becomes publicized through a few glaring atrocities, investigations, promises of reform, and a continuance of the same practices. The underlying reason for this state of affairs was given by the African-American novelist James Baldwin more than 40 years ago. "The only way to police a ghetto", he wrote, "...is to be oppressive." The police "represent the force of the white world, and that world's intentions are, simply, for that world's criminal profit and ease, to keep the Black man corralled. The policeman, therefore, moves through the Black community "like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country". This statement remains basically true, although a more accurate formulation would substitute for "the white world" the phrase phrase "the capitalist class's white power structure".

LAPD: An Occupying Army.

As a Los Angeles Black police officer, Bob Grant, recently said, "A lot of people [in the black community] describe us an an occupying force, and in many we we are an occupying force. People not only don't trust us, but they hate the things we do to other people". The LAPD was long led by chiefs of police who encouraged racist attitudes [and racist crimes]. Chief Parker, who led it from 1950 to 1966, would not even permit patrol cars to be integrated until the early 1960's. He said of Mexican Americans, "some of them aren't far removed from the wild tribes of Mexico." During the 1965 Watts uprising, he warned: "It is estimated that by 1970, 45 percent of the metropolitan area of Los Angeles will be Negro. if you want any protection for your home and family...you're going to have to get in and support a strong police department. If you don't, come 1970, God help you!"

His successor, Ed Davis, fought fiercely against the increased hiring of women and minorities. Darryl Gates, who was police chief from 1978 until forced to resign after the 1992 uprisings that followed the initial exoneration of the cops seen beating Rodney King on television, once said that the reason a number of African Americans died when being held in police chokeholds was "that in some Blacks...the veins and arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people." The present chief, Willie Williams, is an African American who was appointed to defect the tremendous agitation resulting from the Rodney King incident. Constance L. Rice, a lawyer and regional director for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told The New York Times (August 31, 1995) that "the hiring of Mr. Williams had only hardened the resistance to change among many veteran police officers. It's gotten worse since Chief Williams came on."

Bob Grant, who moved from street patrols to a desk job after he complained about bias in the department, said of Williams, "He's just window dressing. He isn't there as a problem-solver. He's there to pacify people asking for change back then. Black police officers in Los Angeles generally learn that in order to get along in the department they have to go along. They come to accept the police culture, just as Black cops of the apartheid culture of South Africa did. However, some Black officers have now formed the Bryant Foundation, a 500-member organization. It has file a lawsuit against the 7700-member Police Protective League, the police officers union, charging it with being a "bastion of white supremacy" and with having spent millions of dollars in membership funds in defense legal fees.

Philadelphia's "Reign of Terror".

The same pattern as in Los Angeles is present in Philadelphia and New York--shocking revelations, an intransigent police union, and a city administration that vows to root out corruption but denies that the corruption is systemic. The Philadelphia Inquirer stated of a current federal investigation of police corruption in that city: "Officers conducted a virtual reign of terror in poor Black neighborhoods for years, stopping suspects at will, stealing money, searching homes with phony warrants, and sometimes even planting drugs ...Working with virtual impunity, these officers were driven by the opportunity to steal money and drugs from street dealers and earn overtime pay for court appearances." The Philadelphia cops in their "war on drugs" became themselves criminals and drug dealers, and even got extra pay for lying in court. Nearly 50 drug cases have already been overturned, and at least 1400 other cases are expected to be reviewed.

The city may lose millions of dollars in lawsuits, money that Mayor Edward G. Rendell laments: "we desperately need for human needs and basic services". He did not, however, show any particular concern in the past for these human needs and basic services, any more that he showed concern for the neighborhoods that were the prey of the crooked cops. So, too, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) has lamented that the expectation of more arrests of police is "killing morale" in the department. This is the same police organization that has been orchestrating a campaign for the execution of Mumia Abu Jamal, who was sentenced in a travesty of a trial for allegedly killing a policeman. Indicative of the bloodlust of its members are the mocking chants of out-of-uniform police counter-demonstrators, chanting "Adieu, Abu" and "Burn, Baby, Burn!", in response to demonstrations for Mumia's freedom.

It's easy to see why the Philadelphia police harbor a special hatred for Mumia Abu Jamal. In his death row-authored book, "Live from Death Row", Mumia documents in a 1993 essay--Rodney wasn't the only one"--the systematic terror campaign of police in Black and Latino communities. Citing a study by University of Florida sociology professor Joseph Feagin, who studied 130 regional reports of police brutality over a two-year period, Mumia writes:."The Feagin study showed that African Americans or Latinos were victims of police brutality in 97 percent of such cases, and white cops were centrally involved in over 93 percent of the beatings". Mumia goes on to write about an astonishing report broadcast on the TV show 'Justice Files'. "From 1981 to 1991, more than 79,000 cases of police brutality, coast to coast occurred. If accurate, Mumia states, "These numbers mean more than 7900 assaults by police a year in America. A civilian is brutalized by police, on average, more than 638 times a month, more than 164 times a week!" Certainly we can describe this as an epidemic of police brutality.

New York Police Department: Corruption in New York.

New York had its scandal and investigations earlier. The Mollen Commission issued its report on police corruption in July 1994. This damning indictment was borne out by subsequent investigations of police precincts in Harlem and the Bronx. It was revealed that false testimony in court was so commonplace that cops cynically would refer to it among themselves as "testi-lying". Far from having diminished , after the publication of the Mollen Commission Report, police brutality has risen spectacularly. The September 20, 1995 issue of the City Sun, a New York Black weekly newspaper, states that a report of the Civilian Complaints Review Board, which is under the jurisdiction of the Police Department, will show a 90 percent increase in the number of complaints of police brutality in the first half of 1995 over those in the first six months of 1993. A board spokesperson confirmed that preliminary data show that there were 2854 complaints in the first six months of the year as against 1501 complaints in the first part of 1993.

The racist behavior of the NYPD was manifested recently in a melee at a Pentecostal church meeting in South Jamaica, Queens. On last August 20th, a retired police officer intruded upon an estranged companion at a tent revival, an altercation ensued, and he was forcibly ejected by church ushers. He returned with other cops. Eventually, about 100 cops in riot gear and hundreds of churchgoers engage in a mixed battle that resulted in injuries to to 28 churchgoers and six cops. The churchgoers charged that the cops pepper-sprayed and beat them indiscriminately. Police officials replied that it was the churchgoers who started the fracas by themselves using pepper-spray and throwing bottles. The police version of the incident would presume that the churchgoers came to worship armed with canisters of pepper spray and bottles in the eventuality of a fight they had no reason to expect.

But the police had previously been involved in at least two attacks on Nation of Islam worshippers. Following protests by Black and white ministers after the first attack, guidelines for police behavior in dealing with places of worship had supposedly been laid down by departmental headquarters, but the police seem to have been unable to heed them. The explanation for the police's nervous propensity to violence in the face of large congregations of African Americans was given by James Baldwin in his 1954 essay: "Any street meeting, sacred or secular, which he and his colleagues uneasily cover has as its explicit or implicit burden the cruelty and injustice of the white domination." Finally, Mumia Abu Jamal, in his 1993 essay, puts it in more practical terms: "The police, tools of white state capitalist power, are a force for creating chaos in the community, not peace. They have created more crime, more disruption, more loss of property, life, and peace than any group of criminal in the nation."