When the man becomes frantic and wraps the seat belt around his neck, the video shows the cruiser stopping. Harris opens the back door and, for no apparent reason other than to vent his own frustration and hurt someone else, Harris then proceeds to punch and elbow the detainee in the head and then place the man’s head in the open cruiser door and slam it shut.

Within hours of this coming to light, he was fired.

This seems like the right outcome — until we look back and see that he’d already been suspended without pay two years ago for excessive use of force, and was also named in a wrongful death lawsuit filed against in June.

This comes in the wake of the murder of Sonya Massey and the swift response to the killer cop Sean Grayson. In the lead-up to November and the elections, the Democrats, who currently control the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice, cannot afford to be seen as allowing police murders to go unpunished. They are, after all, running Kamala Harris as the “top cop,” and have already begun to seek conciliation from reactionaries (both Republicans and Independents) by airing her very first campaign video in which she promises to increase the size of the vicious U.S. Border Patrol.

Just as in the murder of Sonya Massey, the beating here is an opportunity for the police to burn one of their own to save their bankrupt system.

We musn’t be mollified. Only fire can burn out the rot in the heart of the U.S. policing system, and that fire must rage broadly and widely.

At 1:53 PM on the 27th, two NYPD officers responded to a mental distress call made by Win Rozario himself. Soon after police arrived, Rozario felt threatened and grabbed a pair of kitchen scissors. Officers responded by shooting the teenager with tasers. According to the police narrative, Rozario’s mother then knocked the taser’s prong from her son while trying to hold him still. The officers drew their guns and, while his terrified mother and brother screamed and begged them not to fire, shot Rozario to death. Police maintain that this extreme escalation was necessary, that wielding scissors against armed and body armored officers is reasonable grounds for the summary execution of a teenager. They maintain that they feared for their lives, even after deploying their tasers.

The body camera footage reveals this to be a hollow lie.  It shows what is now a sickeningly familiar scene — that police entered Rozario’s home and immediately escalated the situation to lethal violence. Rozario had called for help during a time of intense mental distress. The responders were armed thugs who only spoke to shout orders and only raised their hands to pull triggers. This didn’t happen due to a lack of officer training on mental health calls or by some mistake. The police were adhering to their prime directive, and carrying out their true social role: violent suppression of the colonized, and execution of those capitalism deems “mentally unfit” for production. 

The purpose of a system is made clear by what it does. What police do reveals what police exist to do. There’s no mistaking it: U.S. police exist to brutalize the colonized, the poor, the mentally or socially “abnormal,” placed behind bars or within padded rooms, to keep them too battered and traumatized to resist the function of capitalism. 

This is the reason the President of Columbia University unleashed this same department on her students. The same occupying force for which Biden recently reaffirmed his plans to raise the national funding by 37 billion dollars and increase the ranks by 100,000. He calls it “My Safer America Plan.” Here, we must congratulate the President on his honesty. It certainly will be safer for him and every member of his class, the settler-colonial capitalists. Because in order for them to sit so high, it must be on a mountain of beaten and incarcerated students and marginalized people, with swift execution awaiting all who show even the slightest resistance.

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

Memphis is a city built on slavery. Black African slaves picked the cotton that was shipped up to the city wharfs. Black slaves worked the docks loading the cotton onto the steamboats. From its founding in 1819 until abolition, the buying and selling of slaves was one of the most lucrative businesses in Memphis. Nathan Bedford Forrest, city alderman, owned a slaving firm that charged between $800 and $1,000 for each individual person sold as chattel. In a good year, Forrest and his partner Byrd Hill sold more than 1,000 slaves, with a net profit of somewhere in the realm of $10,000-$30,000 1850 dollars — the equivalent buying power of $370,000-$1.1m in 2023 dollars.

The city fathers were uneasy — by 1860, there were 16,953 slaves within Shelby County and only 22,000 free whites. The danger to the white slave masters was obvious. None of the slavers nor the enslaved were likely to forget the fate (or the lesson) of Haiti; the enslaved looked to their Haitian brothers for inspiration, while the slavers looked on in horror. A law of 1848 created the office of city marshal. On March 27, 1850, a bill was passed by the government of Memphis that required 

State laws against slaves, free blacks, and mulattoes to be enforced by city marshal. 

Slaves not allowed to be entertained or permitted to visit or remain on Sabbath in the house of any free person of color. 

Large collection of slaves banned, except for public worship conducted in an orderly manner under superintendence of a white person. 

Unlawful for slaves to remain in corporate limits of city after sun set or any part of the Sabbath, except by permission of owner specifying limit of time.

This was the foundation of the Memphis police department. In 1852, a resolution was passed to furnish the “Day and Night police” with badges and uniforms. By 1857, the city marshal, the same one who was to enforce the anti-slave laws, was made chief of police and, on February 20, 1860, the marshal title was changed to just that: Chief of Police.

Slaves were property, Black men and women who were held and sold as any other piece of property was. The Memphis police force was founded, like every police department in the entire United States, to protect property. In Memphis, it served a double purpose: protecting the investments of property owners, and protecting property owners (slavers) from the rightful vengeance of their own property, the slaves. The legal end of human beings as property didn’t simply extinguish the legacy of slavery. Although the end of the Civil War saw a formal end to the enslavement of Black individuals, new property relations were quickly erected by the white-supremacist ruling classes. In the South, these were created by the Dixiecrats to protect their huge plantations and their monopoly on politics. In the North, these new property relations were primarily the work of industrialists keen to win over the allegiance of a mostly imported, white, European work force, often with the active collaboration of those workers themselves.

Mid 19th-century Memphis was home to a large number of poor Irish laborers, mostly confined to slums and excluded from city politics. City police records often described them as “Irishman; no account” and “low Irishman,” hounding them and dogging their tracks. However, by the late 1850s, Irish settlers coming into the country from New York and other East Coast ports established a foothold in the Memphis business community. In 1861 Ireland-born John Park, who had married a young Bourbon-Dixie widow and was a successful real estate speculator, was elected mayor. Irish settlers soon dominated the city government and were determined to stay in power no matter the cost. After the close of the Civil War, as thousands of Black refugees and soldiers from the embattled regions of the former secessionist states poured into Memphis, the Irish community of the city, conscious of its shaky hold on power when compared with the old Bourbon Dixiecrats, essentially went to war with the new Black community. Irish laborers tried to prevent Black workers from entering the skilled trades. By early 1866, the city was a powder keg.

In January of that year, Mayor Park and Shelby County sheriff T.M. Winters asked Major General George Stoneman to remove his federal troops from the city streets and turn them back over to the Memphis police. In late April, the army discharged the last of its Black  troops at nearby Fort Pickering. They came into South Memphis waiting for their pay vouchers. On May Day a crowd of one hundred or so former soldiers congregated on South Street where they celebrated and discharged their weapons in the air. In the middle of the May celebration, a white wagon driver turning onto South Street crashed into a Black wagon driver; the two men started arguing. The soldiers rushed to the Black driver’s defense, and the Irish police to the white driver’s. Gunfire was exchanged, and soon there was a full-on street battle between former federal soldiers from the Black Union regiments and the Memphis police. Local whites stiffened the police line, joining them with their own weapons as irregulars.

It was only when Maj. Gen. Stoneman’s federal soldiers arrived to separate the sides in the late afternoon that the fighting stopped. With peace more or less restored, two Black soldiers arrested, and the rest still waiting for their pay, the fall of night saw white Memphians swarm into South Memphis and slaughter every Black person they saw. A reporter from the New York Times wrote:

Large numbers of armed citizens repaired to the scene of the fight and commenced firing upon every negro who made himself visible. One negro upon South Street, a quiet, inoffensive laborer, was shot down almost in front of his own cabin, and after life was extinct, his body was fired into, cut and beat in a most horrible manner.

The Memphis police joined the white mob. For two days, white Memphis burned and massacred the Black community in South Memphis. Forty-six Black people had been killed. Two whites had died. Ninety-one Black homes, twelve Black schools, and four Black churches had been burned.

The Police as White Guard

Tyre Nichols was murdered by the Memphis police. The ruling class has been doing its best to try to confine the public dialogue to the five officers their lackeys have indicted. It shouldn’t escape us that these instant suspensions and indictments fell on five Black policemen. But they, the capitalists and their mouthpieces, desperately want (need) you to believe that the capitalist police are a good institution, a necessary institution. A permanent institution. The only way for them to do this is to perform the same sleight-of-hand game they always do. You remember the phrases: “a bad apple,” rogue cops, even whole rogue departments. 

But the young U.S. settler-republic didn’t build police departments. In the English colonies and the early republic, police simply did not exist. By the 1830s and ‘40s, every urban center in the new settler-republic faced crises in public order spurred on by the development of industrial capitalism. All of a sudden, between the 1840s and ‘80s, every major U.S. city built up a large police force. Why? Sam Mitrani answers this question precisely and elegantly in The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894: “The most basic answer is that the leading businessmen who dominated both urban economies and their politics pushed city governments to build powerful armed institutions that could defend their property and their interests from the new threats that accompanied the development of a wage labor economy.”

The police are the frontline, the shock troops, of the capitalist class. The Dixiecrat planters are gone; formal chattel slavery has been abolished. Legal enslavement is now permitted only through the criminal “justice” system and the state’s prisons, where prisoners, disproportionately Black, toil to produce commodities for private corporations. But though the legal framework of slavery is gone, the property relations of race remain, transformed and reconfigured, but no less poisonous. 

Although only 13% of the U.S. population is Black, 38% of all inmates in prison or jail are. Black citizens are disenfranchised by felony convictions at a rate of 5.3 times that of the white population. In the largest 50 metropolitan areas of the country, mortgage denial rates for Black applicants is twice that of the overall population. Black homeownership is lower across the board than white homeownership. Between 1910 and 1997, Black farmland has decreased (gone into foreclosure, been purchased away, etc.) by 90%. Black wage-earners earn 30% less than white wage-earners on average, and Black households have one-eighth the wealth of white households.

These facts of racial inequality are rooted in the property relations of white supremacy. Black-owned property can be seized by the state, by the banks, and by white capitalists and landlords by a variety of legal means much easier than white-owned property can. Who enforces this regime of property rights and relations? Why, the U.S. garrison-police. The hyper-exploited regions of the U.S., those places where Black and Indigenous peoples have been forced by white supremacist zoning, lending, and other laws, are treated as internal frontiers. In the Black Belt and the urban centers, the police don’t serve the local community; they are a foreign garrison, preventing rebellion. Today, nearly 25% of all police officers in the U.S. first serve in the military. The U.S. police force, no matter the state, no matter the municipality, no matter the national composition, is an occupying army. Killer cops aren’t the exception and they aren’t “the bad apple that spoils the bunch.” They are the intended outcome of the policy that unleashes stormtroopers in blue on the streets of every poor and majority-Black neighborhood in every city across the U.S. Empire. The capitalist relies on the law officer and their truncheon just as much as they rely on strikebreaker and the Pinkerton, the warden and the prison walls, and just as much as they rely on their lackeys in the Congress to pass their laws.

These killer cops are the front line of the struggle between capital and labor in the United States. The horrific murder of Tyre Nichols is not an aberration, but a byproduct of a system working as intended. Every day, Black people are tortured, terrorized, and slain by the U.S. police. While the police kill white persons too, they target Black, Indigenous, and Latinx persons at a disproportionately high rate; they swarm majority-minority neighborhoods, always on the lookout for racially oppressed people to brutalize. This is by design. Those groups form the internal colonies or semi-colonies of the U.S. and those nations oppressed by the white settler majority — and it is not stretching the meaning to call it what it is, the U.S. Empire. 

Tyre Nichols now joins the other names of the slain, including Elton Hayes, murdered in much the same fashion by the very same Memphis police, 52 years ago in 1971. But the legacy of murder and terror stretches back to the middle of the 19th century, and it will end only when property relations themselves are reformed. No reform to a capitalist police department can prevent it from being monstrous.

Great Britain drafted colonized subjects into the colonial police. It was the Indian gurkha armies that conquered the princedoms of the subcontinent. The Portuguese and Dutch merchant houses in Indonesia, Singapore, and Ceylon elevated local merchants to be their agents, their compradors. The same is true of the oppressed who reach a side-deal with the system that oppresses them here in the U.S. Empire. The Black policeman is a colonial turncoat. The Black Democrat mayors of cities like Chicago, Atlanta, and Minneapolis never even try to stand in the way of police militarization and expansion.

James Baldwin warned:

We used to say, “If you just must call a policeman”—for we hardly ever did—”for God’s sake, try to make sure it’s a white one.” A Black policeman could completely demolish you. He knew far more about you than a white policeman could and you were without defenses before this Black brother in uniform whose entire reason for breathing seemed to be his hope to offer proof that, though he was Black, he was not Black like you.