BALTIMORE, MD, August 14—Members of the Progressive Labor Party, along with students and workers in Baltimore, are waging an aggressive fight against the police murder of Black and Latin lives and the capitalist system that generates such injustices.  Together with our friends, we have been part of the citywide protests against the police murder of Freddie Gray and the weekly Wednesday rallies for Tyrone West. On Saturday we joined a multiracial group of protesters that included the Baltimore Bloc, the City Bloc, and others, in marching through Artscape, the city’s arts festival. These protests have been militant in nature-with many arrests at the July 16 and today’s protests. We are showing that this racist system has to go and the working class will not stand by while the cops murder our sisters and brothers.
Korryn Gaines: Murdered by KKKops
This message of fightback is critical in Baltimore, where the cops and politicians have shown wanton disregard for Black and Latin lives. On August 1, in a racist and sexist act, the Baltimore County police murdered Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old Black woman, and shot her 5-year-old son when they went to her home to serve an arrest warrant for a missing license plate!
Not too long ago, a Baltimore judge acquitted three cops, and prosecutors then dropped charges against the rest of the racist police gang who murdered Freddie Gray on April 12 last year. This outrage occurred at the same time as the police murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Filled with rage at these injustices and countless others worldwide, we took to the street, joining hands with students and workers to bring revolutionary changes.                
Protesters Defy Orders
As expected, the police state apparatus came well prepared to smash our fight back. When some demonstrators used a decoy protest to march onto the I-83 ramp (closed for Artscape) and then moved onto the northbound lane of the Jones Falls Expressway to block traffic, they were tricked by the cops. The cop had asked them to let an ambulance through, and when they complied, they found out that the “ambulance” was the police and their wagons! The protestors didn’t let this stop them however; they militantly locked arms in defiance of police orders to stop!
Turning Arrests into Talks of Communism
Echoing the escalation of police terror in the mass roundup of protestors in Baton Rouge, dozens of cops encircled everyone, including onlookers, legal observers, and photographers. None were allowed to leave. Police then swept up everyone in a mass arrest of 65 residents, including 10 youth.  All were handcuffed, kept in vans in the heat, without water for 7-14 hours, and eventually released with fines and citations.
While detained, a young member of Progressive Labor Party successfully helped turn that awful situation into its opposite, into something positive. He and the five others in that particular wagon talked quite a bit. The young comrade helped everyone gain valuable insights about state power today, explaining how the police, jails, government and courts are really a system of organized violence to suppress the working class. He also contributed another very important understanding, that the working class can and must smash this capitalist state, and build a state of a new type, run exclusively by the working class, to lead a communist society in which we will struggle successfully to completely defeat the legacy of huge inequities and, in their place, achieve a fully egalitarian world!
Turning Reform into Revolution
Although militant in their actions, some protestors called for reformist measures to end police brutality. Some demanded that citizens be added to internal police trial boards because the community has a “right to self determination and a right to have an impact in the process of bringing a sense of justice… into their own community.” Some protesters also called for a “reallocation of 10% of the policing budget away from militarization of local police forces and mechanisms of community control and surveillance and towards community programming.” These demands are similar to those of the mass struggle to bring about police reform at the state level during Maryland’s legislative session this year. But those efforts, which engaged hundreds in protests, press conferences, and lobbying, led to only minor changes in the laws that protect the police from being held accountable.
The capitalist bosses and politicians will not rein in the racist cops that protect their exploitative system through violence and intimidation. Instead, PLP members fight for a world without prisons and racist police. That can only be achieved through communist revolution. As a result of the PLP’s engagement in these struggles, these revolutionary, communist ideas have begun to enter the consciousness of many who never considered them before
Say No to Capitalist Masters
No reforms under capitalism can eliminate racism, state sanctioned police intimidation and brutality, or the profiteering system that keeps these in place. The growing movement against the police and racism is facing a ruling class ever more desperate to heighten racism and support “law and order.” Listening to Trump and his supporters reminds us of the “tough on crime” rhetoric of Republicans Reagan and Nixon that ushered in the War on Drugs and the era of mass incarceration, followed by Democrat Bill Clinton’s 100,000 more cops and “Three Strikes and You’re Out” that accelerated mass incarceration and criminalization. Democratic and Republican politicians agree on serving their capitalist masters by deepening racism and repression in the service of maximum profits. Revolutionary leadership from PLP must expose both parties as they hypocritically call for reform. We must lead the working class to the conquest of state power through communist revolution.