LONG BEACH, CA – On Saturday, October 26 under the leadership of the Flores Family, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and their base held a well-attended march and rally in Long Beach to protest at the home of District Attorney (DA) George Gascón. He was elected to office in December of 2020. He defeated the previous DA Jackie Lacey who refused to indict over 600 cops who murdered mainly Black and Latin workers in Los Angeles during her eight  years in office. Gascón, a former cop, ran on a progressive platform. He assured the workers of Los Angeles County that he would prosecute cops and weed-out the “bad apples.” But just like Lacey before him, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and our base know that he is another tool of maintaining ruling class control that will never bring justice for workers killed by KKKops.

Gascón has a long history of protecting the police and helping to enforce racist, violent policies and corruption. In fact, he was promoted to command the LAPD training unit in April 2000 in the aftermath of the Rampart Scandal where he was supposed to clean up the department with ethics and civil rights training (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gascón).The Rampart Scandal involved widespread police corruption in the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) anti-gang unit of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division in the late 1990s. More than 70 police officers either assigned to or associated with the Rampart CRASH unit were initially implicated in various forms of misconduct, including unprovoked shootings, unprovoked beatings, planting of false evidence, stealing and dealing narcotics, bank robbery, perjury, and the covering up of evidence of these activities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal).Just three  years later he was sworn in as Assistant Chief of Police under Bill Bratton, a former NYPD police chief who served as the architect of the virulently racist Stop and Frisk Broken Windows Policing campaign in New York City. As DA in San Francisco, after serving as Chief of the San Francisco Police Department, Gascón continued to protect his fellow officers by not bringing charges in any police killings.

This is why we need a communist revolution. Politicians will never make racism illegal. We started the rally at a local park in Long Beach about a mile away from Gascón’s residence. The multi-racial group of 30 people came together to make signs specifically targeting not only Gascón but the racist system that protects killer KKKops. Young people held signs with slogans such as “No Good Cop in a Racist System” & “Gascón is a Tool of  the System! Down with Capitalism.” As the group marched down a busy street with restaurants and bars, workers in cars honked their horns; those sitting outside clapped their hands, held up their fists, and nodded in agreement and 57 workers took CHALLENGE eagerly.

Once we arrived at his residence, someone from the march started chanting “Vote him Out, Vote him Out.” That chant quickly turned into “Kick him Out.” But then, a PLP member got on the mic and made a speech about how voting the DA out will not change anything; we need to organize workers to overthrow capitalism. Voting is a dead-end for the working class, there is NO ONE we can vote in or out.

The working class will only free themselves through international revolution.
DA Jackie Lacey, a Black woman, made the same promises as Gascón and the people voted her out only to end up with another tool of the system, someone who protects the racist LAPD, LA Sheriffs, and all the other killer KKKops in LA County. Gascón as the DA in San Francisco is no different than Gascón as the DA in Los Angeles. On multiple occasions he made promises to families impacted by police violence and in a year and a half has prosecuted exactly zero police. Families close to PLP are recognizing that this DA is going to be no different than the last and no different than the next. The crowd was very accepting of the idea that there is no good DA in a racist system.
Our previous marches to protest at DA Jackie Lacey’s home had a bigger turnout. Families were fed up over years of being ignored. Some families are reluctant to protest Gascón because they are afraid of alienating him while they wait on his empty promises of reopening cases. We must continue the struggle to show that Gascón and the legal system will never bring justice to the working class. The only justice will be when the international working class overthrows capitalism with a communist revolution. Then we will have justice for all the workers killed by capitalism!