BALTIMORE, June 25—A recent West Wednesday rally—an anti-racist rally against the 2013 murder of Tyrone West that’s become a fixture in Baltimore over five years—may have been modest in size, but it was bold in action.
It began when a cop in an unmarked car stationed himself directly across the street from the rally.
Perhaps the Baltimore Police Department was trying to see if intimidation would scare people and minimize participation at this weekly action. Since 2013, we have been demanding the prosecution and incarceration of the cops who killed unarmed Tyrone West, while in police custody.
Or perhaps the intimidation was coincidental, and just part of BPD’s new strategy, which they call “predictive policing.”
Either way, participants at West Wednesday got right up—and stayed up—in one cop’s face, videotaping and practically surrounding him. Simultaneously, across the street, the rally continued, virtually without interruption, while the sister of Tyrone West incorporated into her powerful speech an astute, angry, loud, and unabashed denunciation of the new BPD police policy.
The “predictive policing” farce
Two years ago, following the police murder of Freddie Gray, the federal Department of ‘Injustice’ (DOJ) issued a report about Baltimore. It admitted BPD strategies routinely cause severe disparities in the rate of stops, searches, and arrests of Black workers. Additionally, the DOJ admitted that this pattern of police department conduct is carried out with excessive force—racist terror and murder.
Now they’ve given this enforcement of capitalist inequality a new name, “predictive policing,” trying to put a pretty face on an ugly reality. Even if you change a pig’s name, it still stinks.
“Predictive policing” claims to use crime data and high tech algorithms - supposedly without racial or class bias - to scientifically pinpoint areas of the city where street violence is likely to occur in the immediate future. Then the BPD aggressively targets those neighborhoods with cops. However, as Andrew Ferguson warns in The Rise of Big Data Policing, published eight months ago, “. . . The history of unjust policing practices will be justified by technical spin.”
As one might expect, “predictive policing” doesn’t send the cops to Roland Park—or similar neighborhoods—where the median household income is $104,482.
Their predictive model is just another version of racial profiling. It’s used to disproportionately send cops to neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester, Freddie Gray’s neighborhood, and to nearby Harlem Park. The median household income for the two neighborhoods is $24,374.
More than two-thirds of Black residents in Baltimore don’t have enough savings to survive for even three months, in case of job loss.
The primary role of police today—just like the very first U.S. police force, whose assignment was to catch escaped slaves - is to try terrorizing the most oppressed members of our class: Black workers. The ruling class of capitalists hopes, in this way, to keep themselves in power.
Capitalist terror shows their fear
Just as Nat Turner’s revolt made the slave owners deeply fearful, today’s ruling capitalists are afraid of working class strikes, uprisings, and revolution. That’s why Baltimore’s government—acting on behalf of the Greater Baltimore Committee, the main organization of capitalists in this area—gives the police department twice as much funding as they give to the City’s entire public education system.
Waverly, the neighborhood where West Wednesday is held most often - just like Sandtown Winchester, and much of Baltimore - has a predominately Black population. So, perhaps, “predictive policing,” not purposeful harassment of the West Wednesday rally, was the reason for a new cop presence at Greenmount Avenue and 33rd Street.
Prediction: fascism and imperialism under capitalism
No matter what the cops were trying to accomplish—they did not succeed.
We will continue rallying and exposing the reality that the police and the government are key parts of state power. State power means organized violence for the suppression of a class, unrestricted by any law. Though racial profiling is “illegal,” cops—during Obama’s presidency and now under Trump—continue to kill about 1,100 people a year, more than three each day on average, because it serves the fundamental needs of the capitalist class.
The only solution to capitalist state violence is to join the multiracial Progressive Labor Party. When our Party earns the respect of millions and millions of working class people, we will defeat capitalism with revolution. With state power we can build a wonderful communist society of sisterhood and brotherhood.
We will fight hard to fully eradicate racism, sexism, anti-gay violence, unemployment, and imperialist war. That’s a world worth fighting for. One day, the savagery of racist police terror, with Black and immigrant workers five times more likely to be victimized, will be so far in the past, it will be hard to imagine how humanity could have lived like that. Join us, and bring that day closer.