Staten Island, NY July 19 — Youth, workers and residents here have been gathering for vigils, rallies and demonstrations to express their outrage over the July 24 racist killing of a 43-year-old black worker, Eric Garner.
Known as a “gentle giant,” Eric’s nickname was Nice. If you needed something and didn’t have the money, he would help you. Eric sold single cigarettes to try to get by, but wasn’t selling them at the time of his murder. After trying to break up a fight between two other people, he was choked to death by one cop as several others held him down. Unfortunately for the working class, this is not unusual. Unfortunately for the cops, there was indisputable evidence of this particular brutal attack. The soundtrack of Eric Garner saying, “I can’t breathe” over and over can be heard on a video from the scene, recorded by an antiracist young man. The next day, a second video documented the failure of the cops or EMTs to try to help the victim for nearly seven minutes after he stopped responding.
Even so, the prosecutors, the press and the politicians are still talking about “investigating,” but in essence are in cahoots to terrorize mainly black working-class men.
Broken Capitalism
Targeting minor crimes and violations is the policy of liberal New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. His reappointed police commissioner, Bill Bratton, first established a “broken windows” enforcement policy in New York in the 1990s, based on the racist theories of social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. This policy has led to record numbers of arrests in New York despite a plummeting crime rate. In reality, it is designed to break down poor and working-class people, especially black and Latin workers. The murder of Eric Garner was no accident. He was trying to fight back against police harassment; he had told lawyers at Legal Aid that he wanted to take his cases to trial.
Ramarley Graham, Kimani Gray, Shantel Davis, Kyam Livingston — all slaughtered by the cops in the past few years in New York. The local bosses “investigate,” but there can be no justice for these families under capitalism. In these committees against police murders, PLP is struggling around this point. Many protesters were also receptive to CHALLENGE and our communist leaflet about the killing of Eric Garner.
The murder spree by the racist criminal injustice system has occurred amid a growing attack on the entire working class. Real unemployment in the U.S. has been growing every year, and is even more brutal in poor neighborhoods. Wages have fallen for over 40 years. Falling wages and unemployment spur these racist killings. The capitalist ruling class needs to intimidate workers into not fighting back, and uses racism to try to divide us. The real broken window is capitalism.
Cops’ Crime Spree on Staten Island
While talking to people at the memorial site where Eric was killed, we heard two other stories of people severely beaten by cops in Staten Island in the last month. According to the New York Daily News, “seven of the city’s top 10 most-sued officers — and 14 of the city’s top 50 most-sued officers — are assigned to a Staten Island narcotics unit working in the territory of the 120th Precinct….The unit has racked up a staggering amount of lawsuits despite being the smallest narcotics bureau in the city.”
Eric Garner’s murder was shocking but not surprising. What else can we expect from a racist criminal injustice system in a notoriously racist preserve like Staten Island? Even electing liberal politicians won’t buffer us from racist murder; elections are a passive dead end. At the same time, the capitalist class is preparing for bigger wars. To fund them, they must steal even more profits by cutting wages, jobs and benefits to workers.
Under capitalism, workers produce all of society’s wealth but are ultimately expendable. The only justice for the working class will come with a communist revolution to smash capitalism once and for all.