Recent Updates by Topic

Popular Opinion Pieces

Op-Ed

Police Brutalize Activist, Again

Praxis Makes Perfect

Last November, Denver police, without warrant or permission, broke into the home of anti-police brutality and anti-war activist Larry Hales, who was attacked and promptly arrested for “interfering with the police.” The police knocked on his door, looking for a man on parole who was temporarily staying with Hales and his partner Melissa Kleinman. Hales answered the door, asked for their business cards, which the police must surrender upon request according to a Denver city ordinance, and told them the parolee was not home. Ignoring Hales, the DPD proceeded to barge in, grab him by the neck, twist his arm, rip out some of his dreadlocks, tear his shirt and throw him down the stairs and into the street before punching him in the stomach and throwing him into a cruiser. He spent a night in jail. In the meantime, the police officers handcuffed Kleinman to a chair and proceeded to ransack the couple’s home.

Hales is currently awaiting trial.

A well known activist in Denver, Hales organizes with a youth empowerment group called FIST (Fight Imperialism, Stand Together), the Troops Out Now coalition, the International Action Center and the Recreate 68 Committee, a group planning protests against the Democratic National Convention to be held in Denver in August.

In the era of the farcical War on Terror and the Patriot Act, in an era when torture is legal and the government can wiretap phone lines without a warrant, an attack of this magnitude on a prominent activist must be seen as an attempt to quash dissent.

But really, what’s new?

The business class, which controls the government, has one interest and one interest only: maximizing profits. The business class demands that the government perpetuate the status-quo that is conducive to “earning” maximal profits, even at the expense of true social progress. Because the destruction of social hierarchies based on gender, race and class (read: sexism, racism and capitalist exploitation) decreases consumer confidence in the market, the business class prefers that the masses stay docile. So ruthless are they that they drug us with TV, poison us with high-fructose corn syrup and fat (which is often all we can afford) and trick us into loving them for what they have and hating ourselves for what we do not. When they win the ideological battle and we fail to recognize our oppression, seeing ourselves instead as completely free, the status quo persists and our divided labor becomes their profit margins. However, when we, or a critical mass of us, begin to denounce the system, the business class employs its private mercenaries and tribunals (the police and the courts) to silence the voices that question the logic of the system.

Since the founding of this country repressive state apparatuses, such as the police and criminal injustice system, have always brutalized and imprisoned the true patriots/the dissenters. Disagree? Take a look at some historical cases of political repression:

Consider the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian immigrants with anarchist political views who were tried, convicted and executed in 1927 for a bank robbery that modern ballistics tests prove they did not commit.

Or what about George Jackson, the Black Panther who organized incarcerated persons in California for prison reform and was gunned down three days before his trial by prison guards in 1971 for an “attempted escape.”

Or consider the now-famous case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the award-winning journalist and co-founding member of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, who sits on death row for the murder of a police officer he did not kill. Abu-Jamal, president of the Association of Black Journalists at the time of his arrest, was convicted for the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. Abu-Jamal’s conviction, though, was based on a fabricated confession; original police records indicated that he maintained his innocence, and the police record was altered two months later to claim that he had confessed. In addition, ballistics tests prove that his .38 magnum could not have fired the .44 caliber round that killed Faulkner.

Thus, on behalf of the business class, the state represses dissent not as an exception but as a rule. The state targets internal dissent with brutality and intimidation, resorting to mock trials, imprisonment and murder when the former tactics fail to stifle activism. That much is clear.

What is less clear is how to move out of this mess. First, we must turn the analytical scope around on ourselves. Let us examine the ways in which we perpetuate oppression. How do we use our whiteness or our maleness or our wealth or our non-immigrant status to hold others down, dividing ourselves and reinforcing the ideologies of oppressor in the process?

Second, we must defend those under attack from the state. Mumia Abu-Jamal and other political prisoners like him can use our support against governmental aggression. A list of their names and addresses can be found at prisonactivist.org. Let us write them letters in solidarity, let us sign petitions and donate to their legal funds, so that they can continue to fight for liberation.

In addition, we must seek alternate news sources that are free of capitalist propaganda. This means turning off cable news, watching DemocracyNow, listening to NPR and reading Amsterdam News or Counterpunch, not The New York Times (just look at the advertisements in the Times — it’s clearly the paper of the oppressors).

Lastly, if history teaches us anything, let it be that freedom is never given; rather, it is always taken. If we want freedom, we must organize our communities to become self-reliant and independent. Only then can government truly exist for the people.

• Add new comment
• Printer-friendly version
• send to friend