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	Workers Vanguard No. 1093	29 July 2016

Bourgeois Hypocrisy over Police Sex Scandal

Oakland

In June, the infamous racist killers of the Oakland Police Department went through three police chiefs in just over a week. The cause was not the shooting of yet another unarmed black man, but rather the exposure of several current and former Oakland cops for having sex with a teenage sex worker.

At a press conference following the resignation of the third police chief, Mayor Libby Schaaf, a Democrat, indignantly fumed, “as the mayor of Oakland, I am here to run a police department not a frat house.” Schaaf, who ran as the pro-cop, law-and-order candidate in the last mayoral election, expressed no such moral outrage when she thought she was only running a gang of murderous racist thugs.

The Oakland PD is so notorious that, due to a court order demanding police reform, the department has been under the supervision of a federal judge for the past 13 years. This order stemmed from a lawsuit filed by victims of a gang of Oakland cops known as the Riders, who rampaged through West Oakland beating, robbing and planting drugs and guns on young black men, but it hasn’t stayed the hand of the cops. In June last year, an Oakland cop shot and killed an unconscious black man, Demouria Hogg, who was locked in his car at the side of a road, allegedly because he had a gun! In the following five months, four more black men lost their lives at the hands of the Oakland police.

Today, bourgeois politicians and media are wringing their hands over the supposed duplicity of these defenders of the “moral order.” In particular, they complain that some of the cops had sex with the young woman when she was only 17 years old, often referring to her as a child. Yet, this “child” understands better than most that a sex worker in bed with cops is far less likely to be arrested by them. The criminalization of prostitution leaves sex workers extremely vulnerable. It is a fact of life that sex workers are, on a regular basis, driven to exchange sexual favors for a temporary stay-out-of-jail card.

It is not just a question of cops extorting sex, but of coercing prostitutes to testify in frame-ups. The star witness in the trial of former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was sentenced to death on false charges of killing a Philadelphia cop, was a prostitute. She was the only purported eyewitness claiming to have seen Mumia with a gun, while others testified that she wasn’t even on the scene. Later, other prostitutes came forward to testify that cops had tried to coerce them into the same lying story. Mumia has now been behind bars for over three decades, most of them on death row. Free Mumia now!

In an article titled “Police Crimes Too Big To Hide” (socialistworker.org, 21 June), the International Socialist Organization (ISO) writes: “Oakland police have gotten away with killing a number of people, most of them Black, in the last few years, but a straw has finally broken at least their leadership’s back. That doesn’t guarantee real change, but it provides an opportunity.” In particular, the ISO points to the possibility of establishing “an elected civilian police commission.” In fact, Oakland has had a Citizens’ Police Review Board since 1980! That hasn’t made a dime’s worth of difference. Schaaf, who has already put the OPD under supposed “civilian control,” is simply doing the usual damage control.

Liberals and others push for tougher laws against prostitution in order to “protect” sex workers. For all the feigned moral outrage of the bourgeoisie, the truth is that all such laws will only further empower the police thugs to brutalize sex workers and use them for their own purposes. We fight for the decriminalization of prostitution and all other “crimes without victims” like drug use and pornography. For us, the guiding principle for sexual relations is that of effective consent, meaning mutual agreement and understanding as opposed to coercion.