Are Police Part of the 99%?

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From People of Color Organize:

Unlike rank-and-file soldiers—who at times have torn off their uniforms and switched to the workers’ side—cops have almost never done so. Police are not temporary soldiers—they have joined that institution of repression as their life’s work.

Some say the police are “just doing their job.” True, but the job of the police is not just any other job. The repressive institutions of the state—the courts, the police, the military and the prisons—exist primarily to protect not society as a whole, but a society’s ruling class; in short, the 1 percent.

Just think about it. How does the 1 percent control the 99 percent? Why haven’t the masses of people risen up against the 1 percent in an assertion of their right to live free? In addition to the media and the school system spreading lies that justify the rule of the 1 percent, they also resort to force, violence, and intimidation to keep the 99 percent in our place.

That’s where the police come in—to keep the “order” by which the property rights and profits of the 1 percent come over all else. When you can’t make your rent or mortgage, the banks and landlords call in the police to evict you. When workers’ strike or try to take over their workplaces, the 1 percent calls in the police to bust it up. When we march, the police are called into surround us and intimidate others from joining.

See also: Do We Really Want More Policing in Communities of Color?

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  • Anonymous

    Excellent. Police are not part of the 99 percent because their JOB, their CAREER is to be the armed tool of the 1 percent.
    No matter where they come from, they are not part of the working class because their role in life is to keep the working class under control.

  • Amen to both of these articles and thanks for linking seeta..

    Resistance to the machinery of domination and control takes more than just glorifying the “working class”..

    Police, guard unions and a range of “correctional” personnel have a vested interest in maintaining the vast profit – driven prison industrial complex, and that of course comes at the expense of communities of color..

    Intersections — as always – is where the real action must be at…