Federal prosecutors allege that Lammond aided Tarrio and his associates during the Capitol Hill putsch of January 6, 2021.

On that day, an armed mob of MAGA fascists, numbering 2,000 and primarily led by Tarrio’s contingent of 200 Proud Boys members, marched on the U.S. Capitol Building as part of a half-hearted putsch. Their ostensible intent was to reinstall Donald Trump, who lost the 2020 presidential election by a considerable margin, as President of the United States; in fact, this was an experiment in fascist mobilization — a training or staging exercise, test-run, or proof of concept, if you will. Trump had spent the weeks following election day in November 2020 mobilizing his most militant supporters with false claims of a “stolen” election. (The majority-Democrat House of Representatives would later impeach Trump for a second time in retaliation.) The rioters actually breached the Capitol’s inner chambers and drove elected officials and staffers into hiding. Still, the attackers failed to capitalize on their victory — apparently owing, in part, to legitimate surprise that they were so rapidly successful.

One rioter was shot and killed during the assault. In the months that followed, four police officers committed suicide. Many cops were distraught at the “family” infighting: They had been forced to confront their mostly white, mostly middle-class fascist paramilitary brethren with a modicum of the repressive violence they normally reserve for terrorizing Black and other colonized people and the desperately poor. 

Since January 6, 2021, more than 1,000 individuals have faced criminal charges, including “sedition,” relating to their participation in the putsch.

Federal prosecutors unsealed the charges against Lammond on Friday, May 19. They allege that Lammond aided Tarrio and his associates during the Capitol Hill putsch, specifically by supplying Tarrio with classified information via text messages. If convicted, Lammond, a “veteran” officer with over 20 years on the force, and a “decorated” “intelligence expert” (who was evidently not intelligent enough to avoid incriminating himself), faces a maximum of 30 years in prison.

One might ask, why would a “decorated” police officer such as Lt. Shane Lammond aid a terrorist like Enrique Tarrio? As a police officer, wasn’t it his duty to prevent terrorism and to catch terrorists?

Actually, the police exist for one reason, and one reason only: To maintain the existing social order by means of violent repression.

What is the existing order in the U.S.?

The United States of America was founded as — and remains, to this day, regardless of how our rulers brand it — a settler-colonial empire. This country was built upon the enslavement of millions of Black Africans and upon genocidal campaigns of land-conquest against this continent’s Indigenous peoples. Dispossession of the colonized remains the economic foundation of the U.S. Empire. In order to keep the oppressed peoples from rising up and overthrowing the colonialist order, the U.S. Empire must arm itself with a powerful repressive force — in fact, the most powerful military and police forces in world history. It is impossible to understand the ubiquity of police terror and brutality against Black and other colonized peoples today if one fails to recognize that the U.S. Empire’s police forces have their origins in settler militias, organized and armed by colonial governors, planters, and land-greedy settlers in order to massacre and drive out Indigenous communities, recapture escaped slaves, and terrorize ethnic and religious minorities.

The U.S. Empire is also ruled by a dictatorship of the capitalists. Originally, when the settler colonies that would later form the U.S. declared independence from Britain, they were ruled by three powerful classes: the big merchants, who owned massive fleets, and whose profits largely derived from the trans-Atlantic slave trade; the bankers, who financed the former; and the slaveholding planters, who grew rich by exploiting the enslaved labor of Black Africans upon their massive plantation estates. Capitalism, in its modern, industrial mode, developed in this country during the 19th Century, first in the “free” North; gradually, as the “frontier” West was colonized, it was transformed into a site of open battle between the capitalist and slave-plantation systems, which led directly to the U.S. Civil War; after the Union’s victory over the slaveholder-dictatorship Confederacy and the legal abolition of slavery, capitalism also began to develop in the South. The big merchants, bankers, and planters converted themselves into industrialists — the “barons” and “captains” of American steel, coal, rail, manufacturing, agriculture, and other industries — and financiers. As capitalism developed, so did monopolies, and the new monopolists retooled the country’s existing state machinery, including its police forces, to serve their new dictatorship.

Those police were reorganized and given an additional purpose: to act as the guardians of capitalist private property in the U.S. Empire’s developing industrial cities, and to crush any and all organized proletarian resistance, even as labor agitation and open revolt raged throughout the 19th century. But as the economic structure of the U.S. Empire changed, its colonial substructure remained intact, and the institution of U.S. policing never forgot or forsook its colonialist origins in slave-catching, plantation enforcement, “frontier” massacres, and white terror.

In sum, it is no accident that police in the U.S. Empire have deep links with civilian-fascist paramilitaries. This is not an unintended “flaw” in the way this country’s police forces are organized; it is a consciously reproduced “feature” of any colonialist police force. Police function, by design, as the crucible of U.S. fascism. As the saying goes, “Cops and Klan go hand-in-hand.”

But if that’s the case, if civilian-fascist paramilitaries like the Proud Boys ultimately serve to uphold the U.S. Empire’s settler-colonial, white supremacist, capitalist order, then why has the Federal Government cracked down in recent years on the fascists involved in the January 6, 2021 putsch?

The war of “lawfare” raging in this country’s courts represents a factional struggle within the U.S. Empire’s ruling class of monopoly capitalists.

One of these factions is represented mainly by the “moderate” mainstream wing of the Democratic Party, currently headed by President Joe Biden, as well as by the vanishingly small and inconsequential “moderate” wing of the Republican Party. This faction’s main goal is stability: It wants to stabilize the U.S. Empire’s fascist regime at its present level of ascendency and brutality, because it believes (rightly so) that any expansion of fascism may provoke civil unrest. This faction remembers the Summer 2020 Rebellion that shook the country after the police murder of George Floyd, and it desperately wants to stave off any further mass uprisings for as long as it can. We refer to this faction as the left-wing of U.S. fascism.

The other faction is represented mainly by the recently ascendant extreme-right wing of the Republican Party, which has coalesced since 2016, and especially since 2020, around its political figurehead, Donald Trump. This faction’s main goal is expansion: It wants to expand the U.S. Empire’s fascist regime at all costs. It wishes to stave off the march of history, of progress, by intensifying the U.S. regime’s state terror and brutality against the poor and colonized masses, against women and LGBT people, and against other oppressed sections of the population. It stands for the openly terroristic dictatorship of the most depraved elements of the monopoly-capitalists, their allies among the predominantly white middle classes, and their lackeys in the military, police, and other institutions of the fascist state’s bureaucracy. We refer to this faction as the right-wing of U.S. fascism.

In the 2020 general elections, the Democrats won a majority in both houses of Congress and the presidency. The left-wing of U.S. fascism temporarily won power back from the right-wing. Since then, in order to consolidate their gains and carry out their program of fascist stabilization, the Democrats directed the Department of Justice and other arms of the Federal Government to carry out a minor campaign of repression against the most militant forces of the opposing right-wing faction. That campaign has even reached Trump himself; the former President is currently on trial for election-related criminal charges.

Such factional struggles are hardly out of the ordinary in a fascist regime. Take, for instance, the rise of the Nazis in Germany.

During the Weimar Republic era, a paramilitary force known as the Freikorps was instrumental in the rise of fascism. The Freikorps took in military rejects and veterans, indoctrinated them into fascism, and remilitarized them as shock-troop terrorists to be employed by the German state. When the proletariat of Germany, fatigued by the brutality of the First World War, but still highly organized and class-conscious, rose up in 1918–1919, the capitalist dictatorship employed the Freikorps to crush the revolution and assassinate its Communist leaders. The Freikorps retained their significance into the early 1930’s, and would be integrated in large part into the Nazi Party’s Sturmabteilung and Schutzstaffel paramilitaries. But in 1934, a factional struggle broke out within the Nazi Party, culminating in the Night of the Long Knives incident, in which Hitler’s faction carried out targeted assassinations of prominent Nazi Party leaders and jailed others, including some Freikorps members, in order to consolidate the Hitlerite faction’s control over the Nazi regime. Hitler would go on to denounce the Freikorps as “degenerates,” reversing his earlier endorsement.

Fascism in the U.S. Empire has not yet expanded to the stage of absolute despotism and omnipresent terror reached in Germany in 1934. But fascism in this country is expanding, and the struggles between its factions are intensifying.

The Trumpite Republicans are amassing their forces, both political, in the Federal and state governments, and paramilitary, in the streets. The Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the whole variety of civilian-fascist paramilitaries that have coalesced and grown in recent years, especially under the MAGA banner, are of the same type as the Freikorps in proto-fascist Germany, and they will be made to serve the same ends by our American Hitlerites. In cities across the U.S. Empire, these rabid dogs, these cops in plain clothes, are assembling to terrorize oppressed communities: They stand across from LGBT bars and nightclubs holding rifles. They stand across from Movement for Black Lives marches, alongside their blue-uniformed brethren. They stand across from reproductive healthcare clinics, threatening the patients who seek abortions and other health services and the doctors who provide them. They are ready at a moment’s notice to open fire, to commit lynchings and massacres, to enact the chaotic-yet-organized terror that only a civilian-fascist paramilitary can — no questions asked. And when the time comes, when fascism is absolutely ascendent in the U.S. Empire, those civilian-fascist terrorists who prove useful will be absorbed into the American Schutzstaffel; the remainder will be discarded.

The “moderate” Democrats, the “moderate” left-wing of U.S. fascism, are carrying out the present lawfare campaign against Trump and his most militant supporters not because they care about “safeguarding our democracy,” as they claim, but because they are desperately clinging to what remains of their power. Faced with the ascendancy of a new variety of U.S. fascism, the Democrats have been compelled to use the repressive force of courts and police — even against other police. But this cannot last forever; the weight of this regime’s internal contradictions will inevitably bring it to the point of collapse. As fascism continues to expand across the U.S. Empire, the question is therefore not whether the Democrats will fold, but when.

And as for the oppressed masses? We are poor and exhausted by the everyday facts of our lives; we are horrifically outgunned by the enemy state. Our only weapon is organization, and organization on an independent basis. Let the capitalist parties vie for hegemony in this country’s halls of power. Our task is to organize, educate, and arm ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors, and our communities — to build power where we stand. Only by building popular power among the oppressed masses will we find the power to defeat and eliminate the fascist cancer, once and for all.

The police arrested Anthony Lester later that night on probable cause, but released him after a 24-hour holding period, without charges. For four tense days, Ralph’s family, and the Black community in Kansas City, grieved and demanded justice, while Lester sat at home, free of charges. Obeying police instruction, local news agencies protected the perpetrator by refusing to speak or print his name. Nevertheless, local community members gathered in protest outside Lester’s house on 115th Terrace over the next few days, persistently demanding he be brought to justice for his attempted murder of an unarmed Black child. The police, the state prosecutor, and the Missouri courts did not want to prosecute him.

Anyone can see that this was an attempted murder. The Missouri statute for second degree murder, 565.021, is simple. It requires only that the perpetrator knowingly caused the death of another person or, with the purpose of causing serious physical injury, caused the death of another. There is no reasonable debate to be had. No one shoots a child in the head without intending at the very least to cause serious injury. Lester, in no uncertain terms, shot to kill, and Ralph almost died.

Missouri, like many states in the U.S. Empire, also has a so-called “attempt” statute (562.012). To be found guilty of an attempted crime, the law of Missouri requires only that the perpetrator have taken  a “substantial step” toward carrying it out. Failing to successfully carry out the crime in question is not a defense. Being physically unable to carry it out is not even a defense.  In other words, Ralph’s survival makes Lester no less guilty of attempted murder in the second degree. Moreover, the penalty for a criminal attempt in Missouri is the same as the penalty for the completed crime — in this instance, ten to thirty years imprisonment.

Now, most people believe that the police are obligated to enforce the law and “protect and serve” people. That’s why they exist, after all, right? What would be the point of the police if they only “protected and served” when they felt like it? 

Good question! In fact, police explicitly aren’t obligated to enforce the law or protect people from danger — not even life-threatening danger. In a 5–4 decision in 1989, DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dept. of Social Services, the Supreme Court of the United States warned that citizens have “no affirmative right to governmental aid, even where such aid may be necessary to secure life, liberty, or property interests.” The Court ruled in that case that the county’s department of social services had no duty to protect a young boy from being beaten until he suffered brain damage, despite the fact that his mother repeatedly begged them to intervene. This doctrine, now well-established in U.S. law,  also applies to police departments. For example, in the 2005 case Castle Rock v. Gonzalez,  SCOTUS ruled 7–2 that police have no affirmative duty to protect people — even when doing so will prevent murder. In that case, a woman, Mrs. Gonzalez, called the police because her husband abducted her children, and she feared for their safety. In fact, she had an active protective order in place preventing him from coming to her house or seeing the children. The police chose to wait and see what happened. Mr. Gonzalez murdered all three of their children and then committed “suicide by cop.”

Every day, thousands of people across the U.S. Empire are arrested on “probable cause.” Only a modicum of evidence is required to make a “probable cause” arrest: If a single person says out loud that they saw a crime being committed, that is sufficient for police to arrest a suspect. Probable cause is so broad as to be essentially a free pass to police to arrest almost anyone at any time, for any (or virtually no) reason. Prosecution of any crime requires merely probable cause to proceed. This may be confused with another standard of proof, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which is the standard for conviction in a criminal trial. To bring charges, all prosecutors need is a a few threads of evidence: hearsay, or a person claiming to have witnessed, for example, the suspect giving money to a friend on the street, or pocketing an item, or running down a street, or otherwise “acting suspicious,” is sufficient “probable cause” to support an arrest and continue prosecution for an illicit drug sale. “Probable cause,” those thin threads, prevents defendants from getting cases dismissed — cases upon which any reasonable person would say the state has no grounds to proceed. As a result, hundreds of people lose their jobs, their homes, and their families or are incarcerated each month — on these scant probable cause.

Every day, lawyers challenge probable cause on cases far less evident than this one, and judges in every court in the country frown and reply, “It’s only probable cause, counsel,” before overruling the defense. Yet in the case of Andrew Lester, who was witnessed and admitted to shooting Ralph Yarl, point-blank, in the head,  the police decided, and attempted to convince an enraged public, that there isn’t enough evidence to arrest this would-be child killer. The emperor is not only naked and exposed; he has been skinned and hanged from the branches of a sycamore tree.

The Black community of Kansas City, and their allies, did not wait for the police to act. They demanded action. The masses, primarily the local Black working-class community, poured into the streets. They gathered in front of Lester’s house to demand justice. They gathered in front of the police station to expose the lie of “protect and serve.” Missouri has not forgotten any of her dead — not Michael Brown, not any of the Black lives cut short by white supremacy. The Movement for Black Lives has only sunk deeper and broader roots among the masses; its demands have become more organically and urgently adopted with each Black life cut short by the U.S. Empire’s regime of apartheid terror. The people protested for days, crying for action. Slogans that have become all-too-familiar in their demands for justice denied under the white supremacist empire were heard on the streets — “Black lives are under attack!”; “Standup, fight back!”

An organization calling itself The People’s Coalition led the protests, mobilized  marches, prepared slogans, and channeled the wrath of the people into an undeniable, if still localized, political force. The Yarl family’s lawyer, Ben Crump, pressed the attack, demanding the recalcitrant state immediately arrest Lester. It’s not only in Missouri that voices have been raised. No, across the entire empire, the people have lifted their voices in protest. Black outrage and working-class solidarity rose swiftly.

Two days ago, over one thousand students at Staley High School in Missouri walked out of class in an organized display of protest at the callousness of Kansas City officials. Ralph’s friends and classmates carried signs and banners, and condemned the failure of the city to prosecute Lester, then to release him on a low bond — $200,000 — when most attempted murderers look at bonds of $1 million or more.

This firestorm has even drawn, like a dying, confused moth to a mighty inferno, the undead imperial president Biden, a man of an age and complexion with the murderous Lester, to Kansas City. There he and his second-in-command Kamala Harris took the opportunity to denounce, of all things, gun violence. Gun violence! Of course the white supremacist state has tried to tie the shooting of a young Black man by a white would-be killer, as pure an expression of direct national oppression, of murder motivated undeniably by racism, as a problem caused by the white supremacist’s tool! God forbid the oppressed take up the same tool, and wield it against their oppressor! No, it wasn’t the gun that gave rise to lynch terror! It’s not the gun that causes Black children to fear the police from childhood — the same rabid dogs-in-blue who will routinely pummel, tase, and strangle Black people to death without once drawing a gun! It wasn’t gun violence the people of Kansas City gathered to combat: it was the white supremacist state — the state that refused to bring a racist child-killer to justice, until it was forced to.

But that state, that white supremacist state, is afraid! Its servants keenly remember the of the 2020 Summer Uprisings, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and fear the specter of another rebellion. They know that the next wave could begin anywhere, and they are desperate to prevent it. The prosecuting attorney and his compatriots in the Kansas City police have finally made the decision to hold Lester “accountable,” and city officials have finally acknowledged that the crime had a “racial component.” But they will just as soon provide for Lester’s acquittal, if they believe the public is no longer watching. It’s not the crime that concerns them — it’s the threat of another uprising.

The people have everything within their power. When they are united and prepared, nothing can stand against them, not even the white supremacist state of the most powerful empire in human history. We have seen it reel; we have seen it falter. Now, the pressure must be kept up, not only to prevent Lester from entering a favorable plea deal or the state prosecutor from purposefully bungling a trial, but also to remind our oppressors of the cost of injustice — and only the people can do that.

“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.

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.