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...

The Mal Gobierno (as Mexican federal, state and local governments and governmental authorities are called by resistance groups, including the EZLN and the Zapatista movement to mean “bad government”) has promised a full federal investigation — a promise that has been made (and broken) before regarding crimes allegedly perpetrated by the state. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side is dying. 

Job offers abound for those innocent enough to believe it. USD $400 a week, in Jalisco, buy a bus ticket here and we’ll take care of the rest. The shoes and backpacks piled haphazardly in a corner, the cremation ovens out back — they finish the story. The state police visited in September of last year, arrested a few people, and left. More shoes and more backpacks piled in the corner, and acrid smoke filled the sky again. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side feels pain.

When the suffering beg for justice, the government meets them with scorn. “What do you want, woman?” an exasperated official yells at a grieving mother. “You think I lost your daughter? Just go away!” Mothers organize to search for their disappeared children, shaming so-called law enforcement into doing their job. The state police come and take everything the people find, leaving buildings literally swept clean. We’re categorizing the evidence, says the federal attorney. The mothers know better, and their wails echo throughout the empty rooms. First the government disappeared their children, then it disappeared the remains the mothers dug out of the ground with their own hands.  

Arrests have been made, arrests are always made. This time, it’s a few municipal cops, an alleged “cartel leader” living on the outskirts of Mexico City. The National Guard has taken over from the municipal police, and the federal attorney’s office has fired the state attorney. Is this justice? No, but it’ll lead to the resignation of the governor. Political infighting is drowning out the cries of mothers demanding justice for their murdered children.

Mexico is at war, and those with power profit. 

Local toughs shake down a municipal market for protection money. Everyone knows who they are, where they live. But the police don’t do a thing about it, because they are in on this little enterprise, too. News filters out about a little ranch on the outskirts of town. Turn a blind eye, take the envelope, don’t ask too many questions. When a police officer’s time is up, they cross the line and join their friends in the mafia.

Mexico is at war, but only one side is fighting. 

Trucks full of soldiers in army green, or Marines in blue, patrol ominously, always at the corner of one’s vision. For the narco? No, for the people. A warning. Stay out of our way, say the automatic rifles. The military ousts the police, and takes over their racket. A captain-capo picks up the envelopes full of cash, and kicks a share up to their colonel-consigliere. The military arranges for planes to land and send transport trucks to pick up the bales of drugs they carry. They sell guns to paramilitary forces, hitmen and the so-called cartels. The military enforces the will of the government, and the will of the government is to get rich, the rest be damned. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side uses bullets.

Paramilitary gangsters force families off land for which their ancestors fought in the Revolution over 100 years ago. Then come the businessmen— the alchemists who turn screams into profit and monetize the blood of the dying. Wells run dry, soil is poisoned, pollution chokes the air, agricultural workers make an average of less than USD $150 a month, and imperial capital receives enormous profits. Encomenderos of the Spanish colonial age would recognize this oppression well. The people resist, they fight tooth and nail, they file suits in court, they march in the streets. The people pursue every outlet available to them within the confines of the law, but these confines form no limit for the government. It doesn’t matter what the courts decide — hitmen resolve any inconvenient judicial or political outcome. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side knows it. 

The government has always studiously pursued a pacifist foreign policy devoid of antagonism or confrontation. Why, then, does it so violently deny this same respect to the people it claims to represent? The government wipes the blood off its chin and flashes a ghastly smile to the camera; it stretches out its arms to embrace whichever capitalist ghoul seeks its blessing; it sacrifices its people’s dignity, destiny, present and future to feed the slavering, ravenous maw of capitalist empire. And for anyone who stands in the way, the ovens roar with flames, ready to consume, to devour, ready to reduce a human life to a pitifully small collection of bones, teeth and personal effects, the essence of a life, buried in the dirt to clear the way for the great and terrible march of imperial capitalism. 

Mexico is at war with its own people! El Mal Gobierno must go! 

Sonya Massey is dead. She was killed on July 6 by the police state, in the form of white supremacist Sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson. Her murder should elicit rage, but you have no reason to protest this time according to Democrats. The pig was immediately disavowed, fired and charged with first degree murder. Just a Bad Apple. The criminal justice system is working exactly as intended for Democrats and everyone else who accepts Black People’s murder as a regular occurrence. 

Benjamin Crump, the celebrity-attorney representing Massey’s family, has already stooped so low as to thank presidential candidate Kamala Harris for a tweet promoting the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which failed to pass in 2021. The Act itself is an embarrassing half-measure that would do little to reduce the ever-increasing number of people shot, strangled, or run down by the statesian police. More embarrassing is the fact that Vice-President Harris and her fellow Democrat stooges completely dropped the issue after they failed three years ago. Sonya Massey’s execution was horrific enough to inject some life into the Democratic Party’s decrepit lip service machine. The machine produces words, but it runs on continuous supplies of blood from oppressed communities in the imperial core. Not just any blood tribute will suffice; only the most barbaric case of murder you can imagine will awaken the beast and get its mouthpieces to work their magic.   

Sonya Massey did exactly what the pigs told her to do before they shot her in the face. She called the Police after hearing people outside her home, but responding officers were immediately hostile towards her after it took 3 minutes and 50 seconds for Massey to open the door at 1 in the morning. Out of concern for an unidentified car in Massey’s driveway, police entered her home and demanded identification. Hearing the sound of water approaching boiling temperature, officers directed her to remove the pot which was on the stove. Massey immediately did so and moved to place the pot near the sink. The officer, seemingly afraid of the boiling water, backed away despite the distance between him and Massey as well as the impending kitchen island. Massey’s response to the officer’s behavior was either a joke or a comment of offense towards the officer’s implication she might hurl a hot pot of water across her living room. She said, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” We will never know exactly what she meant, because immediately after saying these words Sean Grayson pulled a gun and pointed it at Massey’s head. He told her, “I’ll fucking shoot you in the fucking face” and approached the pot which he supposedly felt could threaten his life at any moment. Terrified, Massey apologized for the comment and tried ducking away from the gun that was now in her face. She could not outrun three bullets. Before the water had cooled, Grayson was making excuses and calling Sonya Massey a “crazy bitch.” The only mistake Sonya Massey made was thinking the pigs were coming to help her that night. Grayson’s mugshot would soon expose skull tattoos on his right arm which resemble the Nazi Totenkopf, or “Dead’s Head.”

Democrat opportunists were quick to gloat the captured moments of savagery as proof of the success of police worn body cameras. Do not let them get away with it! Such ridiculous claims should be met with ridicule and derision. Do not forget that police officers and prosecutors across the empire wanted body cameras for years. It might seem paradoxical, but law enforcement had everything to gain and nothing to lose from their introduction. The police killing of Michael Brown was a perfect opportunity for the pigs and reformers, led by Obama, to reveal their collaborationist nature. While the cameras were pitched as a solution to police violence, they were nothing but the latest iteration of modern police surveillance. We know this to be true because according to the Federal government‘s own studies, body cameras do not make police less violent. Their own studies prove this, along with the continued rise of police killings since their introduction. Body cameras continue to be successful in their intended purpose; prosecuting the poor and surveilling the masses. They are a regular tool in the prosecutor’s office when it comes to gathering evidence against impoverished people, but are rarely used against the police. Cops will deliberately turn off their cameras before an interaction in case they decide to brutalize or shoot anyone. Crucially, the police get first looks at controversial body cams and will restrict the release of footage until they can permeate a false, exonerating narrative into the ether. This is precisely what Illinois State Police did to Sonya Massey. They shot her and lied for over two weeks, describing her death by white supremacist bullets as self-inflicted. Such is the beauty of police reform. 

Be wary! They will not hesitate to use this moment for their own despicable ends. They will trot out some cowardly guidelines on New and Improved hiring practices for police departments across the Empire. They will demand millions of dollars in new funding packages for flashy training programs while the masses continue to sink into deprivation. Grayson will become a Christ figure for cops — given up for the sins of the system so that Democrats can declare it washed clean. They will pat each other on the back for being so transparent, go home to their respective galas, and tell their servants what they want for dinner that night. We need to ruin their party. Let the murder of Sonya Massey anger you. May it flow through your veins, into your arms and legs. She called them for help, they entered her home and shot bullets into her skull. Carry it with you on the bus, at the office, and on the commute home. Steel yourself for the fight ahead, and do not vote for cops. 

The LAPD murdered Keenan Anderson on 3 January 2023, over a week ago. Keenan is the third person to be executed by the LAPD in January of this year — meaning the third in as many days. Horrifically, his case isn’t exceptional. He’s one of hundreds slaughtered every year by white terror. Last year, in 2022, police across the U.S. Empire killed at least 1,176 people — nearly 100 a month. This is two years after the June Uprisings rocked the white supremacist establishment in the wake of the extrajudicial murder of George Floyd and the subsequent calls to defund or abolish police across the U.S. With 2023 not even a month old, we’ve seen intensified white violence, as we warned last year: rising class consciousness has triggered a brutal wave of white reaction. The U.S. settler-empire makes use of white supremacists in and out of uniform: police terror is joined by paramilitary fascist organizations that are their brothers-in-arms.

Keenan Anderson was 31 years old when the LAPD tased him to death. He was a beloved 10th grade schoolteacher at Digital Pioneers Academy, a Washington D.C. charter school. He leaves a 6-year-old son and a grieving family. His cousin, Patrisse Cullors, is one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, and she now faces what many Black organizers must face in this country: the murder of one of their own family members by the enemy state’s police force. Did the LAPD know who he was when they tased him over and over? We don’t yet know. Whether this was a revenge killing carried out by U.S. domestic stormtroopers or yet another unmotivated execution designed to keep the population compliant, the fact is that LAPD sent 50,000 volts at 3.6 milli-amps of current pouring through Keenan Anderson’s body. They electrocuted his heart.

He Needed Help

Although we don’t know much — the police have, so far, only released highly edited versions of their body camera footage, purposefully cutting critical minutes of their execution — we know that Keenan Anderson was involved in a traffic accident and that he flagged down the police to help him. He was distressed, confused, and in all likelihood concussed.

Officers restrained him, chased him down, and then, after they already had him under their control, grabbed and pinned him to the ground. The body camera footage clearly shows Keenan becoming more and more frightened and desperate. He cried out: “They’re trying to George Floyd me!” He was handcuffed and bound, shot with a Taser over and over for at least 35 seconds. Like so many others, he was executed in public by the police.

The LAPD has since released a police-conducted toxicology test, claiming Keenan’s blood showed positive for cocaine and marijuana. As any trauma specialist can tell you, concussions and brain injury from a car accident can result in delirium, hallucinations, delusions, and other perceptual disturbances. People suffering from concussions can appear drunk, become amnesiac, and forgetful. But the LAPD didn’t give Keenan medical attention. They gave him a lethal administration of force: they crushed him to the concrete and unloaded at least two Taser shots at him.

A Taser gun (manufactured by the same corporation that makes the body cameras worn by many police departments and one of the companies that funds the Atlanta Police Foundation, Axon) normally releases its charge in five-second bursts unless the officer keeps their finger on the trigger, like they did with Keenan. He didn’t suffer for a mere five seconds; the Taser was deployed seven times longer than the “safe” five-second cycle. Many studies and most regulations warn to “avoid prolonged or continuous exposure(s) to the TASER device electrical discharge…. Severe exhaustion and/or over-exertion from physical struggle, drug intoxication, use of restraint devices, etc., may result in a serious injury or death.” Is this the same department that gave a glowing interview to CNN one year ago and said they would only deploy a Taser “with somebody who is violent, that’s posing an immediate threat to maybe ourselves or another citizen”? Is this the same department who’s Captain said the community wanted police “to de-escalate. We’re only going to use that Taser when a suspect’s actions are violent”? Surely the LAPD doesn’t expect us to believe that Keenan Anderson posed an immediate threat, that he was “violent.” He was Tasered after running, crying, and sitting on the ground. He was electrocuted while he was physically restrained. Even the beasts with badges in the LAPD don’t claim he was threatening anyone or that he tried to attack them. They killed Keenan Anderson because they could, because they know they’ll get away with it, and because it’s their job to keep the working people of the U.S. Empire — particularly the Black, Chicanx, Peurto Rican, Indigenous, and other oppressed peoples — quiet, cowed, and afraid.