Qualified immunity is a defense against standing in a civil trial, normally against police
Download 0.87 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Can’t solve until capitalism is overthrown
KritiksCapitalismViolent capitalism is the underlying cause of police brutalityThe Internationalist, Summer 2015, Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Talks Strike Black America, http://www.internationalist.org/killercopswstalkblackamerica1507.html DOA: 10-2-16 Tens of thousands of young people, black, white, Latino and others, and many older people as well, participated in the mass mobilizations last summer and fall. Over and over they chanted “black lives matter,” “hands up, don’t shoot” and “I can’t breathe” – slogans that reflect a sense of anguish and impotence. Many were radicalized by the experience, as they could see that Obama’s America is anything but “post-racial,” and the pretense of democracy is a cruel hoax. For that experience of activism not to turn into an exercise in frustration, like the endless antiwar marches that occur every time U.S. imperialism invades another country, it’s vital to draw the lessons of those protests – what they showed about the potential for struggle, but also what they did not, and could not, accomplish, and why not. It requires an understanding of the system of official and semi-official racist violence and murder that has characterized American capitalism ever since it solidified on the bedrock of slavery, and continues today. Can’t solve until capitalism is overthrownThe Internationalist, Summer 2015, Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Talks Strike Black America, http://www.internationalist.org/killercopswstalkblackamerica1507.html DOA: 10-2-16 No amount of protest will convince the ruling class to muzzle their uniformed guard dogs, whom it requires to keep the poor and working people down. What’s needed is militant class struggle on a revolutionary program. The Internationalist Group has called for an end to all drug laws. We call forlabor/black/immigrant mobilization against police terror. We have acted to carry this out, with the unprecedented port shutdown to “Stop Police Terror” by Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in Oakland this past May Day, and the “Labor Against Police Murder” contingent the same day, organized by Class Struggle Workers – Portland. Bringing to bear workers’ power to stop the wheels of commerce could stay the rulers’ hand for a time. At the height of struggle one can also mobilize to get the police and military occupation forces out, as the IG called for in Ferguson last August and again in Baltimore this spring.”10 But such actions can only have a temporary effect. Ultimately, there is no solution to racist police brutality under capitalist rule: it is inherent in the system. Racist vigilantes, from George Zimmerman to Dylann Roof, act as auxiliaries. Whether in the form of slave catchers, KKK nightriders and racist sheriffs under Jim Crow, or mass incarceration combined with paramilitary police forces today, supplemented by massacres, American capitalism has always devised a way to keep its black, Latino and now increasingly immigrant wage slaves in thrall. The killer cops aren’t running amok, in contradiction to their assigned task, they’re doing their job to enforce racist “law and order” which is essential to American capitalism and has been ever since African slaves were brought here in chains. The fact that year after year, from one end of the country to the other, virtually no police are indicted – much less convicted – for killing over 1,000 civilians a year is no accident. As we wrote in The Internationalist No. 1 (January-February 1997): “Trigger-happy cops with Glocks pop anyone they consider ‘suspects’ or ‘perps,’ not to mention bystanders, subway riders, drivers who are parking, drivers who are stopped at stop lights, passengers in cars, pedestrians on the street, patrons in restaurants, young men playing football, young men outside bars, young men inside bars – particularly if the victims are black, Hispanic or Asian – as well as roaming around housing projects in off-duty vigilante squads, and not infrequently bumping off their own wives and girlfriends. They think they can get away with murder, and history – recent and past – shows they are right. Why? Because they are the enforcers of the monopoly of violence in the hands of the capitalist state, the apparatus set up to guarantee the profits and the rule of the bourgeoisie…. “To get rid of racist cop terror, you have to sweep away the system that spawns it. That system is capitalism, and what’s needed is a socialist revolution to make the working class and its allies the rulers of society.” While various pseudo-socialists are always seeking to build a new “movement,” adapting their politics to whatever is the flavor of the day, such amorphous “coalitions” always end up reducing their program to the lowest common denominator. This may at times bring many people into the street, but it cannot point the way forward to actually win. The struggle for socialist revolution requires a leadership, a multi-racial workers party with a clear revolutionary program, a party that champions the cause of all the oppressed and can overcome the rulers’ attempts to set one ethnic group against another, employed workers against the unemployed, etc. In short, we need, as we wrote in 1997, to “forge a revolutionary leadership, with a core of cadres tested in the class struggle, like the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky which led the October 1917 Russian Revolution. ■ Prosecutor Immunity NegProsecutor immunity is not qualified immunity, it is absolute immunity – this is not topicalJoann Schwartz, 2014, Police Idemnification, New York University Law Review, June 2014, http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/NYULawReview-89-3-Schwartz.pdf , Joanna Schwartz is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. She teaches Civil Procedure, the Civil Rights Litigation Clinic, and a variety of courses on police accountability and public interest lawyering. In 2015, she received UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Professor Schwartz is one of the country’s leading experts on police misconduct litigation. Her studies examine the frequency with which police departments gather and analyze information from lawsuits, and the ways in which litigation-attentive departments use lawsuit data to reduce the likelihood of future harms. She has also examined the financial effects of police misconduct litigation, including the frequency with which police officers contribute to settlements and judgments in police misconduct cases, and the extent to which police department budgets are affected by litigation costs. Professor Schwartz has also looked more broadly at how lawsuits influence decision-making in hospitals, airlines, and other organizational settings. Professor Schwartz additionally studies the dynamics of modern civil litigation. Recent scholarship examines the degree to which litigation costs and delays necessitate current civil procedure rules, and compares rhetoric with available evidence about the costs and burdens of class action litigation. She is co-author, with Stephen Yeazell, of a leading casebook, Civil Procedure (9th Edition). Professor Schwartz is a graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School. She was awarded the Francis Wayland Prize for her work in Yale Law School’s Prison Legal Services clinic. After law school, Professor Schwartz clerked for Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York and Judge Harry Pregerson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She was then associated with Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady LLP, in New York City, where she specialized in police misconduct, prisoners’ rights, and First Amendment litigation. She was awarded the New York City Legal Aid Society's Pro Bono Publico Award for her work as co-counsel representing a class of inmates challenging conditions at Rikers Island. Immediately prior to her appointment, Professor Schwartz was the Binder Clinical Teaching Fellow at UCLA School of Law. This study additionally prompts questions about the empirical foundations for related doctrines. As just one example, prosecutors \\jciprod01\productn\N\NYU\89-3\NYU303.txt unknown Seq: 77 28-MAY-14 11:25 June 2014] POLICE INDEMNIFICATION 961 enjoy absolute immunity from suit in part because “[t]he public trust of the prosecutor’s office would suffer if he were constrained in making every decision by the consequences in terms of his own potential liability in a suit for damages.”353 The absolute immunity granted to prosecutors makes it exceedingly difficult for plaintiffs to civilly challenge wrongful convictions and other constitutional violations.354 Yet, assuming that prosecutors would be indemnified as frequently as police officers currently are, absolute immunity may be an unduly strong protection. Judges and legislators also have absolute immunity,355 but are as likely—if not more likely—than police officers to be indemnified. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 0.87 Mb. Share with your friends:
|