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Sorry to tell you but there is a problem with cops and low income or lower caste people
KEITH ELLISON: Well, you know that the police are now and have always been in place to maintain the legal/social order. If that’s a just social order, that’s one thing. If it’s one based on slavery, Jim Crow segregation, capital, and Big Business abusing labor, then the police have always played this role where they are the ones who sort of maintain that social hierarchy.
I grew up in Michigan, and people there have a strong memory about how it was police and policelike forces that put down strikes, how police and parapolice forces were the ones who maintained the racial hierarchy.
When John Lewis, who’s a member of Congress, got arrested for challenging segregation, he was arrested by a police officer, right? So they maintain a legal status quo and a social/cultural order and always have.
It’s important to understand you can’t look at the police in isolation. A lot of times we do that because what they do is so flagrant. I mean, the knee on the neck, right? Or the shooting of [African American youth] Laquan McDonald, where [Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke] wrote in his report that [McDonald] attacked him with a knife, when he was so clearly assassinated on the street. Same thing with Walter Scott [an unarmed African American man killed by a police officer in South Carolina], who was running away and was shot.
The question is, why do these cases so often result in either no charge, no grand jury bill of indictment like in the Mike Brown case [in Ferguson, Mo.], no conviction, hung juries? I mean, we all saw what happened to Philando Castile—live on Facebook—who was shot down by Officer Jeronimo Yanez [in Falcon Heights, Minn.], and yet there was no conviction in that case. It’s just almost impossible to imagine it wouldn’t have resulted in a conviction, but it didn’t. Or what about Freddie Gray? Perfectly healthy, they throw him in that [Baltimore police] van, and he comes out dead, and next thing you know, all these officers are charged, and yet no one is held accountable for the death of Freddie Gray.
There’s got to be some element of complicity and culpability on behalf of the system that sends the officers out there.
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