After nearly 200 days of protesting the cops who murdered 26-year-old Black Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), Breonna Taylor, the city of Louisville, Kentucky agreed to pay a settlement of 12 million dollars to Taylor’s family. The settlement is considered “historic” because it is one of the largest payouts (and in a relatively short amount of time) for a police killing of a Black worker in the U.S. Meanwhile, the one cop who was charged, did so for accidentally spraying his ammo into a neighboring apartment.
No amount of money will substitute for the lives stolen by this system, no matter how many times the bosses try to wash their blood-soaked hands with it. Racism is essential for capitalists to divide and control the working class and the ruling class will never truly punish the thugs who maintain their power. Therefore, we are left with one choice: turn our anger into action and organize ourselves into the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) for communist revolution.
Louisville: the rule, not the exception
There’s a heap of lies surrounding the actions of Louisville police. The attorney general, Daniel Cameron, lied about the grand jury unanimously agreeing to drop charges against the officers. Then, Cameron used his race to appeal to the Black community as he stood before the public to say that the officers would not be charged. In one account, the officers claim to have had a no-knock search warrant, but say they knocked and announced themselves anyway. In another account, they claim to have had a “no-knock” warrant initially, but then claimed that it changed to a “knock and announce” warrant.
Either way, “no-knock” warrants will never stop the police from murdering workers, especially Black workers. As Professor Alex Vitale said in his book, The Ending of Policing, the police are “violence-workers”. They are trained to be violent, and use excessive force in Black and immigrant communities. Police reforms like those promoted by Black Lives Matter-aligned groups cannot deter them from doing that job.
Take the body cameras, for instance. Since the killing of Mike Brown in 2014, the use of body cameras was expanded. Yet, the cops have shot and killed nearly the same number of people every year since (Washington Post). In the case of Breonna Taylor’s murder, the footage from the body-camera was only recently made public and strongly suggests the lack of integrity of the crime scene after the raid and the investigation that followed.
The city of Louisville installed their first Black woman chief of police, Yvette Gentry. When asked what she thought about the lack of reforms in the department, Gentry said the reforms would “take a life of their own” and made clear that she’s “not a fan of taking too many tools off the table”, claiming that it’s more of a matter of recruiting the “right men and women.” This is how the ruling class uses identity politics to persuade workers into fighting for broken reforms and accepting  the racist murders capitalism has to offer. But no matter the gender, race, or ethics of the individual person, or which end of the political spectrum they are on, the job of the police is to protect and serve the ruling class and to keep the working class subdued. It’s in their history.
Police: frontline defenders of capitalism
Today’s police are descendants of capitalism’s growing need to terrorize and control the working class. Their origins began in the British colonial era, when the bosses formed patrols of native-born Irish workers in 1812 to suppress violent Irish working class rebellions against British imperialism. Wearing distinctive uniforms with copper metal buttons, these “coppers” or “cops” were formed in London as masses of workers first joined militant trade unions in the 1820s.
By 1855, policing was adopted by the U.S. bosses in rapidly industrializing Chicago, amid growing working class strike movements. While the British bosses may have invented the concept of police, it was their former apprentices, the U.S. bosses who gave birth to racism, who took it and ran with it. The Chicago Police Department, is comprised of fugitive slave catchers, terrorist anti-union Pinkerton detectives and later KKK scum, soon spread their model to cities like New York and everywhere as this model was adopted by capitalists worldwide, all developing into the police forces we know today.
While bosses try to placate the working class with a number of police reforms, including implementing what they’ve called, “Breonna’s Law”, which bans no-knock search warrants—it can never alter the fundamental character of what the police are.
The ruling class has nothing to offer the working class. The working class as a whole cannot be bought or bribed into forgetting the rulers who murder us for the sake of profit. What will truly be historic is when the entire international working class unites behind the red banners of PLP, and throws this entire capitalist system into the garbage can of history once and for all.