IS THERE something fundamentally wrong with the police, or can they actually protect and serve the people, and even come over to the side of the struggle?
This question is made more complicated by the attitude expressed by individual officers and even groups of them in support of certain struggles--most notably, during the occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol last winter, when the police union stated for a time that it wouldn't clear the building of protesters and even directed members to sleep over at one point.
But the truth is this: The police force is not, and cannot ever be, a force for social justice.
In reality, the police don't even do the job they're supposed to do: protect regular people from crime and violence. This has nothing to do with the individual intentions of cops on the street--though that's not to say there are not murderous and bigoted people on the force--but the structure and purpose of the police is to protect the status quo: a state of affairs where a tiny minority benefit from the exploitation and oppression of the vast majority.
It is the nature of the police as an institution under capitalism to protect inequality and--in the U.S. in particular--to both act out and promote racism.
Occupy Wall Street's slogan "We are the 99 percent" both illuminates and confuses this reality. On the one hand, it is absolutely true that a tiny parasitical minority of economically powerful people who benefit from control over the immense wealth they have stolen from the rest of us.
However, this begs the question of how do they manage to hold on to what they have taken from us? While we are often ruled by ideological justifications for inequality in society--that we can't redistribute the wealth, or we shouldn't--in the final instance, we are prevented by the existence of a government (or, as Marxists would say, the state) that has the monopoly of violence and uses it to keep the intense inequality in place.
Society is not just a collection of autonomous individuals: institutions exist to mediate between the class of rich owners and directors of capital and the millions of people who must work for them in order for society to function. As socialist Peter Morgan wrote:
"The police are just one part of the state which, along with the courts and the army, is there to do one thing--protect the property of the minority who own it against the mass of the people who do not. Frederick Engels pointed out over 100 years ago, "The state is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel."
Capitalism is a society that is based upon the accumulation of capital and therefore needs a highly efficient state machine to protect its property. The police exist because the antagonisms between classes with conflicting interests can no longer be settled directly--they therefore require a power appearing to stand above society to regulate conflicts. The state does this by ensuring that it alone possesses a monopoly of power, although it claims to operate in the name of society as a whole. In fact, it operates as the instrument of one class to oppress the other, subordinate, class"
Despite the majority of cops coming from working-class backgrounds, the role of the police puts them directly at odds with the aspirations and needs of the rest of the class.
Police are a necessity in all class societies, not to stop crime, which they do a miserable job at, but to enforce a social order that will never allow the liberation of the oppressed or economic justice. In the U.S., police encounter a crime in progress on average once every 14 years.
@ 2:51 when the dude yells out, "WHAT NOW fukkEERRRRRR!!!!"