Connecticut launched its “Mobile Crisis Intervention Services” with the 211 network in March 2020. 211 operates under a national NGO called United Way, managed by a small group of millionaires who earn six-figure salaries and spend their days fundraising for more donations. Contrary to popular belief, 211 itself does not provide any services; it is designed to connect people to services through its call centers. These have come under strain in recent years due to a 300% increase in call volume since 2019, even excluding Covid-19 cases. At the same time, social services in the state have been cut across the board. To increase 211’s funding at this stage of austerity would only exacerbate the growing frustrations with the network. People often spend hours waiting on the phone only to discover they do not qualify for any services, or the service has been discontinued, or under-funded to the point it is practically useless for them. The purpose of a system is what it does; NGOs like United Way are businesses for the executive board, and they exist to profit off of people’s misery.

When Everard Walker’s family dialed 211 in the morning of February 19, Everard was experiencing a mental health crisis after running out of the medication he needed to eat and sleep. The family specifically requested a social worker be sent to their home for an evaluation, stating that Everard did not pose a risk to himself or others. They deliberately tried to avoid a police response to their home. HPD responded anyway after social workers themselves asked police to arrive at the residence for lethal backup. Originally, two social workers arrived with two police; these responders spoke with the family through the door and at one point entered the home. But they would soon exit the apartment out of an apparent concern that Everard would throw a pot of boiling water at them (this part of the body cam footage has not been released). The “fact” pattern is similar to the murder of Sonya Massey, a Black woman gunned down in her home by police in 2024 for having boiling water on her stove.

The number of pigs arriving at Walker’s home quickly grew to 11 after this “threat” was reported: a Black man in crisis at his home surrounded by family. With this number of police in the hallway, the situation began to deteriorate. After an hour of attempting to get social workers and police into the apartment, Walker’s family began to ask the responders to leave. Perceiving the true quality of the 211 “Crisis Intervention Service” as an escalatory police response in disguise, they wished to deal with the situation on their own to prevent tragedy. HPD did not leave; instead, they rushed Walker’s apartment, shoving aside his screaming daughter who tried to stop them. At least three police officers broke into the apartment and moved to pile on Everard. Everard pushed them back and took out a knife. And this is when Hartford police officer Alexander Clifford shot him in the chest three times. The Attorney General’s Office released a 20 second body cam of the murder, but you do not even need to watch it to know the cops were the aggressors in this wellness check turned murder. The presence of cops in a settler-colony at all is aggression. For social workers to invite cops to a “wellness check” is aggression. Their entry into the family’s home was aggression. That they approached Everard and assaulted his family members was aggression. The family would have been entirely justified in defending themselves by any means necessary when the police approached their household after they were clearly told they weren’t welcome. The bodycam footage shows state sanctioned executioners of nationally oppressed people performing their role to a tee: control, coercion, and murder. There is simply no way for cops to be present in the vicinity of a nationally oppressed individual and for the power dynamic between them to be entirely non-antagonistic.

To label Connecticut’s “Mobile Crisis Intervention Services” as a “policing alternative” would be misinformation. 211 and the services it provides are not law enforcement alternatives; they are law enforcement partnerships. The social workers who receive mental health calls are instructed to work in collaboration with local police. Law enforcement are their partners, as stated by their CEO, and the two groups respond to mental health calls together. This means that if you call 211 and specifically request social workers – like Everard Walker’s family did – several pigs will still respond to the call, ready to arrest or shoot us at their will. The collaboration of social workers, healthcare workers, and the police reveals their character as weapons of the state. This is not to say that social workers and healthcare workers are individually social murderers; rather, the white supremacist system compels them to collaborate with the most violent aspects of that system on all levels. Police lack this nuance. They are taught that there are three types of people in the world: Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs. Sheep are those who want to go about their lives with as few problems as possible. They are weak and needing of protection. Wolves are the Bad people, those who would do harm to Sheep. And police themselves are the Sheepdogs, who corral Sheep and look out for Wolves. This is the lens through which police view us. You are either a Sheep needing direction and authority or a Wolf that needs to be put down. We know how they view Black and Brown people. These national oppressors cannot be reformed.

If police reform can be effective, why does the number of police killings follow a historic upward trend? Why have police become more violent, not less, since the widespread introduction of bodycams? And why do policing alternatives like 211 route directly to the same pigs they are thought to circumvent? In truth, police reforms are only effective for specific classes of people; those who oppress Black and Brown people directly and those who are materially invested in the local political machine. Within the latter we include every single politician and petty-bourgeois leader who pleads for these serial killers to act more demure. Reform is a losing battle for the nationally oppressed as a whole because every reform is enacted alongside the continuous deprivation of material conditions for the nationally oppressed as a class.

For every revolutionary moment that passes with a few reforms, revolution only becomes more remote. Fascism entrenches itself, becomes more disguised, more efficient in its oppression. Seeing reform for what it is doesn’t just provide clarity; it allows us to course-correct and implement some real revolutionary changes to the status quo of our movement. This is how the Black Panther Party responded when Black people were being killed with impunity by police and deputized white supremacists. They created CopWatch Organizations with real weapons and struck fear into their oppressors. They started by forming patrols; following the police, observing arrests from a legal distance, and carrying law books to assert people’s rights. A more modern version of the BPP CopWatch would make use of our cell phones, to film police activity and give us video evidence that the police can’t cover up for months, like they do with body cams. We can look to ICE Rapid Response networks as one current example coupling digital tactics with older models of community defense. Local phone trees direct observers to document ICE calls and interact with their neighbors. Rapid response networks could easily transition or multiply into CopWatch groups as contradictions sharpen. Police murders and surveillance overwhelmingly occur in the segregated Black and Brown neighborhoods. These are the best neighborhoods for residents to form CopWatch organizations.

A CopWatch organization involves a group of people (we have identified 10 as an appropriate benchmark) who respond to police presence in their community by showing up in person to achieve some level of confrontation; in the early stages, this will involve filming police activity with phones and ideally providing helpful information to whoever the police may be harassing. As the organization develops and becomes more trusted in the community, they may find it beneficial to explore more advanced means of intimidation than filming alone. White individuals in organizations need to be prepared to put their bodies between nationally oppressed people and the cops if the situation calls for it. White cadre need to be specially trained in best practices for interceding and deescalating cop aggression. The question of what exactly this should look like can only be determined by practice; interacting with the nationally oppressed to determine the best avenues for white socialists to antagonize the local government.

The police are often one of the sharpest contradictions in a community, but this can only be confirmed through investigation. Some neighborhoods either do not experience a significant police presence yet, or the community members feel that there are other, more pressing issues that deserve initiative from Scientific Socialists. One example of a formation that can still respond to these contradictions is a SafetyWatch. This group can respond to and address a multitude of reported issues in a community, from food scarcity, to housing costs, to unhoused people in need of material support. These groups can carry necessary resources on their person, like narcan, water, or first aid equipment. The purpose of a SafetyWatch is to replace the state-led social services which have proven to be ineffective and/or violent. Instead of state social workers who respond with police, a SafetyWatch responds with the real support that is requested, minus the pigs. The message to the community becomes, “Don’t call the city, call your neighbors.”

For each formation put forward here, CopWatch or SafetyWatch, the question to be asked is, “How does this work advance the cause of Revolution?” This is a question we should be asking ourselves in all the work we choose to do, and we should be able to answer it with confidence. To fail to plan for the decisive path forward with every step we take is to forfeit the future to the reformists, who will cry trained tears for every victim following Everard, while slipping his killers a raise.

The most violent thing you can do is nothing.

On February 27, 2026, eight days after killing Everard Walker, Hartford Police murdered 55 year-old Steven Jones during another mental health call in which an ambulance, not police, was requested. Joseph Magnano shot “Stevie” nine times in the street as residents tried to deescalate the officers. Magnano has since been fired (so he can be moved to another department). The Hartford Police Union is defending the murderer and seeking his reinstatement. A complete piece on the murder of Steven Jones is forthcoming.

The most violent thing you can do is nothing...

Even before the settler-republic declared independence, slave patrols were organized to deal with the ever-growing population of enslaved African labor and the threat of rebellion. Hired guns would patrol the property, investigating and brutally punishing dissent, the possession of weapons, and attempted escapes. As far back as 1643, the English colonies were organizing themselves into confederations, pledging to enforce each others’ “right” to the return of fugitive slaves and indentured servants:

It is also agreed that if any servant run away from his master into any other of these confederated Jurisdictions, that in such case, upon the certificate of one magistrate in the Jurisdiction out of which the said servant fled, or upon other due proof; the said servant shall be delivered, either to his master, or any other that pursues and brings such certificate or proof.

Following the establishment of the United States, plantation owners quickly began entreating state legislatures to form standing patrols, as well as laws that explicitly targeted all Black people — regardless of their legal status. These fugitive slave laws and the patrollers enforcing them curtailed Black freedom of movement and assembly, subjected them to constant questioning, and inflicted unspeakably violent punishments. These practices spread throughout the colonies, and the institution of policing as a means of oppressing Black and Indigenous populations went from ad hoc posses to state machinery.

Following the U.S. civil war, despite the legal end of slavery, slave patrols prowled the countryside. Anti-Black violence, once perpetrated by pre-war slave-catching squads, took on the same form as anti-Indigenous violence: it shifted to the domain of terror groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. These vigilante terror organizations were, in many cases, composed of the elite of Southern and Western U.S. society: plantation owners, former Confederate officers, and ex-slave-catchers. Not only were these men enlisted by the secretive, semi-legal terror societies, but they also joined the rush of explicitly authorized “Indian fighters” – U.S. soldiers and cavalrymen, hired guns, and bounty hunters that poured into the Indigenous lands still left west of the Appalachian chain that the young settler-republic had determined must belong to white men.

To support this new drive, laws were carefully rewritten to empower police to enforce the political and economic repression of non-white people. This fundamental principle of U.S. settler law laid the foundation for the white-supremacist laws of today. The disproportionate impact of law enforcement on racialized populations has been thoroughly examined and excoriated for decades. The verdict is clear: law enforcement is systematically constructed to perpetuate white supremacy.

Since the creation of municipal and regional police in the 19th century, they have not only targeted Black and Indigenous persons. The police were not merely the enforcement arm of the theft of Native land and the suppression of Black labor; they have been the armed fist of capital, serving to break strikes, attack unions, and halt the labor movement in its tracks. Capitalists have consistently called upon police, private security, and the military to break strikes, often with deadly force. Under the guise of “peacekeeping,” cops respond to mass demonstrations by cracking skulls. Since the cold war, the intelligence wing of law enforcement has used the specter of communism to harry and infiltrate militant labor movements. With the blood of thousands of workers on their hands, the presence of police “unions” in labor federations like AFL-CIO is a grotesque mockery. The police are not workers: they are our most violent oppressors.

Cops are not simply hapless mercenaries, selling their labor as cogs in a repressive machine. They are not blameless workers caught up in a Kafkaesque machinery beyond their capacity to change. They are active participants in murder, genocide, labor suppression, and all the heinous acts for which they were created. They are the active agents of colonial and imperialist oppression. Indeed, the nature of policing as a tool of enforcing white supremacy and capital hegemony makes it especially appealing to a particular class of ideological actors. Police forces are staffed by the most motivated white supremacists. Fascist militias are largely populated by cops (active and retired), military veterans, and small business owners, as well as those with aspirations to law enforcement. They dedicate huge amounts of time, money, and labor to organizations designed to enforce white supremacy – all while comfortably employed in service of an empire built on those ideals. Many such groups paint themselves as “anti-government,” because they believe the U.S. government is holding them back from their fascist aims. That is, they resent the fact that the state has itself attempted to regulate white supremacist violence into a form it can control; they long for the early settler-republic, when any white man could wreak his will with a riding crop, a fist, or a Colt and no one would gainsay him.

State-sanctioned violence and extrajudicial fascist terrorism cannot be so identified as pointing out a badge.  In a recent database leak, exposing membership lists of the fascist Oathkeepers, numerous high ranking officers and sheriffs were identified among the hundreds of law enforcement officers on the books. One such lieutenant — who signed up for the Oathkeepers with the promise to use his position to recruit for the organization — was transferred to administrative duties upon knowledge of his involvement. Months later, he was back to his normal duties, as if nothing had happened. The police are police whether they wear their badges or not.

Law enforcement often dedicates some labor toward monitoring white supremacist extremism, although this is vastly overshadowed by its investment in tracking and attempting to entrap leftist organizations. Undercover agents and confidential informants insinuated into fascist groups often fail to report vital information, use their position to testify in defense of these groups, or are simply ignored by their handlers. The FBI, generally tasked with handling these investigations, are simply uninterested in the incrimination of fascists, instead instructing their informants to gather intelligence on the opponents of fascism. Law enforcement is deeply invested in the project of maintaining a white supremacist status quo. It has a long history of surveilling and violently repressing those who seek liberation, while giving unending leeway to those who attempt to heighten that oppression.

The overlap between fascist groups and law enforcement is sporadically reported on by bourgeois institutions, including media exposes, academic reviews, and even intelligence reports. Like all liberal exposes, however, these serve a dual purpose; by presenting the information, they defang it. The framework of these reports usually presents the presence of “bad apples” and promises that the issue merely needs some pressing reform. Thus, these liberal bourgeois reports disguise the fundamental nature of the white supremacist violence that pervades settler society. Through the lens of liberal “analysis,” all social ills are the result of scoundrels sullying otherwise valorous institutions. However, this misunderstands not just the material base out of which these very institutions were crafted in the first place, but also the insidious ways in which they get continuously reproduced, refined, and made more suitable to their primary purpose: maintaining the particular property relations of capitalism.

Policing presents its semi-legitimate face as “protecting the people,” originally with an explicitly racialized definition of “the people,” then retreating into implications and dog whistles. To bolster the white supremacist mythos that paints racialized populations as the source of civil strife, the ruling class has spent centuries pumping money into bad studies and employing racist professors to espouse the theory that certain populations are inherently “criminal.” Every new measure passed to empower the police has come with corresponding narratives stoking the fascist flames: “superpredators,” “crack epidemic,” “migrant caravans”. This has served to simultaneously drive recruitment and political support for the police from among the beneficiaries of white supremacy. The attractiveness of law enforcement to today’s fascists is unsurprising, given this historical context.

Law enforcement itself serves as a crucible of fascism, concentrating the most destructive aspects of the ideology into a superheated core. Its role as the violent arm of the state provides fertile soil for recruiting, training, and organizing nascent white supremacists into capable, radicalized cadres, indoctrinated with fascist ideology and inoculated against empathy. Combined with the tendencies of groups toward polarization (a meta-analysis of which can be found here), the overtly oppressive role of law enforcement creates an environment that drags its members toward fascist radicalization. This radicalization happens in much the same way that all institutions (fascist or not) mature into hegemonic forms, through the mutually-reinforcing processes of selection and intensification.

Selection is the process of sorting masses of individuals based on their demonstrated values and selecting the “best” — i.e. most well-suited to the group’s aims — for promotion, deeper into the institution. Although this can be a rigidly-defined process, as in the case of deliberately constructed organizations (such as workplaces), selection also takes place constantly throughout social life. Friend groups, community associations, activist circles, and more are constantly going through a loose process of selection; those who best fit in with the group and its purpose tend to find themselves more deeply involved in it, encouraged by those already integrated within it. The values being selected for vary from group to group, and can cover an immense range of criteria: specific skillsets, existing social ties, resources, even fashion sense or humor. The most common value being heuristically screened for, across all social structures, is how well an individual “clicks” with the existing group: like selects like. “Promotion,” of course, can also be a spectrum: anywhere from simply spending more time with like-minded individuals to actively being given more responsibilities and privileges within an organized structure. As specific traits get selected for, the individuals exhibiting those traits become better positioned to do the selecting, bringing in other individuals who share those same traits that brought them through the process themselves.

Intensification is the deepening of existing values, making individuals that move through an institution become more suited to the institution’s purpose. Again, this process can be explicit or informal, depending on the specific context. Individuals can be formally trained in specific skills, subjected to exercises designed to impart values and lessons through experience, go through rituals to promote group cohesion, or simply be subtly influenced by existing members of the group in a passive process of socialization. The more formally-organized a group is, the more explicit the programs of intensification that tend to be employed, but the social aspect is always present, and is often of the most relevance. As social creatures, humans are primed to modify our own behaviors and ideals to best integrate into our particular social environments. Over time, whether through passive or active means, groups tend to engender in their members deeper commitment and competence. Whether as education, radicalization, or collegiality, intensification works to define the character of both a group and the individuals within it.

These two processes act in concert, at all levels of institutions, playing into each other to best adapt a group to its niche. Selection elevates those individuals best adapted to modulate the intensification of others: the most charismatic speakers, the most skilled leaders, the most committed to the cause, inevitably find themselves brought up into a position to bring up their like-minded compatriots. Intensification serves as an indicator for selection, with those for whom the process yields the most favorable results increasingly demonstrating their fitness. Those who fail or refuse are seen as poorly-suited to the group and become ever-more estranged, if not outright ejected from the group. As an institution takes shape, these processes can cause it to calcify and regiment its process. Selection becomes increasingly based on set criteria, with explicitly delineated measures of promotion. Intensification practices become standardized trainings and rituals aimed at achieving specific results. But even in the absence of formal protocols, the social structure itself continues to set the pace of its own development, through the placement and shaping of its members.

Nowhere is this more typified than in the crucible of fascism. A new recruit on the force has already gone through several steps of selection and intensification that are adapted to the niche fascism aims to occupy. To even want to join, an individual must already believe in the myth of police as “peacekeepers.” They must ignore the blatant violent excesses of the institution. They already have an instinct toward protecting capitalist, white supremacy hegemony — whether they fully realize it or not. In other words, the police recruitment process itself has already selected for people who tend toward violence, chauvinism, ego, and myopia in service of capital (even if these traits are not always fully-formed in the novice). These traits are intensified during training, where recruits are taught laws, practice with firearms and other weapons, learn interrogation tactics, go through drills on handling “hostiles,” and more. Every step of the training serves to viscerally engrain in these recruits that they are the last line of defense for society against a violent, degenerate, implacable enemy, that their fellow brethren are comrades-in-arms, that the mission of the police is pure and righteous, worth laying down their very lives. They are taught that violent confrontation is not only inevitable, but righteous. In short, by the time they even become a full member of the force, people who were already filtered for traits suitable to fascism have already begun being radicalized into an ideological resentment toward the communities they police.

And then the process really gets started.

When that recruit walks into headquarters, he is entering a building absolutely packed with people who were just like him when they were recruits. Some were simply idealistic and justice-minded, without much regard for the obvious systemic horrors of the institution. Some were white supremacists from the beginning, and saw those horrors as noble. All of them went through a refinement process, and all have been modified by it in some way. They may have nervously laughed off bigoted comments, or they may have made some themselves to fit in. They may have seen squadmates commit acts of brutality, and thought to submit an official complaint — provoking the ire of their compatriots — or they may have eagerly joined in. They have spent every working day being exposed to propaganda, both informal and officially-sanctioned, about crime rates and the dangers of their profession and the fundamental threat posed by “certain communities.” They are promoted officially based on their arrests, tickets, experience, and the approval of higher ranking officers. They are promoted socially based on their cohesiveness within a group that has gone through these same radicalizing processes.

Those who couldn’t cut it — those who were too turned off by the systemic abuse, casual chauvinism, and blatant lies — are not in the room when that recruit walks in. Those who have best embraced that regressive atmosphere are introduced to him as mentors. In a radicalizing environment, the least radical have the least influence and the most radical dominate. In the case of police specifically, fascists find themselves easily making friends, enforcing “law and order,” and rising through the ranks, both institutionally and socially. They find themselves in positions of influence, and continue to shape the process that helped shape them. This attracts more of their ilk to the force, further impacting its development — and theirs. The state gains ever-more violent and rabid enforcers, while the fascists gain ever-more combat experience, fresh recruits, and institutional backing.

Whatever the particular proclivities of that recruit, he will find himself either becoming more immersed in the fascist milieu, more aligned with their ideals, tactics, and even extrajudicial organizations — or he will find himself ostracized, friendless, demoted, fired. The more the members of fascist militias integrate themselves into the (already fascistic) institution, the less common that latter outcome occurs. The initial selection process becomes implicitly more discerning, with potential recruits needing to meet a higher and higher threshold for what level of brutality they think is justified. The training and propaganda become more intense, directed as they are by those already selected for fascist allegiance. The distinction between state-sanctioned violence and paramilitary formations becomes more and more irrelevant.

This is the real reason all cops are bastards: all cops are subjected to a potent, omnipresent bastardization apparatus. They are recruited by fascists, trained by fascists, mentored by fascists, promoted by fascists. If they happen to join another fascist organization, that’s simply them branching out. And when they do, they bring with them tactical training, weapons proficiency, social prestige, state support, and an intensified clarity of purpose. The enemy of the working class is an active army: well-armed, well-resourced, well-organized, and highly motivated. They can be met with nothing less.