HYATTSVILLE, MD, May 4—Today a bold car caravan rally, organized by Community Justice (CJ), protested the reinstatement of six killer cops to the Hyattsville police force. Twenty cars carrying 30  people, adorned with militant signs against racist police brutality rolled several times around the police station. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members participated in planning this event, calling attention to the way the racist capitalist system systematically terrorizes and intimidates the working class, leaving us no choice but to organize for communist revolution!
Drivers honked their horns continuously as we circled police headquarters. Rebellious music (“Momma momma, Can’t You See”, “Fight the Power”, “They Don’t Care about Us”), blared from a loudspeaker, and a CJ spokesperson vehemently condemned the police and the political leaders of Hyattsville as the caravan stopped briefly in front of the police station.
What sparked this protest was the decision by the Hyattsville police chief, endorsed by the city administrator and unopposed by the mayor and city council, to reinstate cops who murdered Leonard Shand last October. Ten cops from three jurisdictions surrounded Shand and killed him in a hail of bullets like a firing squad (see CHALLENGE, 11/6/2019).
Since then, Shand’s family, CJ, PLP members, and other community organizations have demanded accountability for this heinous racist crime. Instead, we have been met with a pro-cop narrative from Mayor Candice Hollingsworth, Police Chief Amal Awad, and now City Administrator Tracey Douglas. They are  justifying the killing, saying that “no violations of internal policy” have been found (Route 1 Reporter, 5/5). These three misleaders are Black women, showing that nationalism or feminism won’t lead us to liberation.
We need working-class unity for communist revolution. All politicians serve only the needs of capitalism, whatever their personal identity and rhetoric. We can only rely on the rank-and-file of the working class to advance our struggle for
liberation! Strikingly, Awad and Douglas made this decision while the formal investigation of these cops by the Prince George’s Police Department (PGPD) and the States Attorney for the Shand murder has not yet been completed.
 These Hyattsville political leaders are providing a pre-emptive, de facto exoneration of these killers! Not that workers expect justice from the PGPD investigation. After all, that department harbors cops like those who murdered William Green (see CHALLENGE, 2/17/2019 and Washington Post, 10/23/2019). PGPD has been subject to two federal consent decrees from the U.S. Department of Justice for unconstitutional policing, and still conducts racist intimidation, assaults, and murders.
As CJ rightly continues to escalate its demands for accountability, PLP members will continue to participate, while calling on all workers to join the long term fight for real justice that can only come from toppling the capitalist system. That system needs racist terror and intimidation to keep the working class divided, exploited, and disarmed. Building multi-racial, revolutionary unity in the long term battle for a communist, egalitarian, anti-racist society is the key to our final victory over this inhumane, racist capitalist system.