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For Free Mass Transit! Cop Terror in NYC Subways In response to the NYPD’s ramped-up war on black people, Latinos and the poor in the subways, activists have called for a “Day of Transit Action” on January 31. In recent months, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has increasingly hounded the homeless, those asking for money or food and anyone who jumps the turnstiles. Subway stations are infested with cops, especially in black and brown neighborhoods. In one of several cellphone videos that went viral last fall, cops can be seen pulling their guns on a full subway car and then tackling 19-year-old Adrian Napier, who was seated quietly on a bench with his hands in the air. Another unarmed black youth, 15-year-old Benjamin Marshall, was punched repeatedly in the face for being black and in the vicinity of a fight that subway cops were supposedly “helping” to defuse. Not even the women selling churros are safe—cops were recorded dragging one Latina at Broadway Junction away in tears and handcuffs. Called by Decolonize This Place, the January day of action will be the third in a series of “FTP” (“Fuck the Police”) protests. In November, hundreds of righteously pissed-off youth held protests first in Brooklyn and then in Harlem, carrying signs reading “Poverty Is Not a Crime” and “More Churros, Less Cops, NYPD Out of MTA.” Over 50 were arrested. Charges against some were dropped, and for the rest, the charges will be dismissed after six months if they have not again been swept up—a tall order with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s cops on the prowl. We demand all charges be dropped immediately! The main protest demand, “cops out of the subway,” expresses a healthy impulse against police repression. The rub is that the capitalist rulers will never remove their cops entirely, and would only reduce their presence in the subways to deploy them elsewhere—to terrorize the ghettos and barrios, and to try to suppress workers engaged in class struggle. The cops, along with the courts, prisons and military, are the core of the capitalist state—an apparatus of organized violence directed against workers and the oppressed, in defense of capitalist class rule and profits. Black people are most often the targets of this state terror because the American capitalist order is rooted in and maintained by the forcible segregation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of society. The capitalist state cannot be reformed to “protect and serve” the people, or be controlled by the community. There will be no end to racist cop terror until capitalist class rule is smashed through workers revolution, in which black workers are slated to play a leading role. These young protesters, who by themselves have very little social power, should not be out there alone! The multiracial labor movement, not least New York City’s 41,000-strong transit union, should be leading the struggle to protest the racist cops and make the subways accessible and at least tolerable. Transit workers have shown they are capable of shutting down this finance capital of U.S. imperialism. Many of them have personal experience with NYPD harassment—whether it be family members, friends or themselves. (Eric Garner’s mother and sister were in the transit union.) The power of the unions is chained by their pro-capitalist leaderships, which in the case of the transit union has treacherously joined the bosses and the Democrats in calling for more cops in the subways. We seek to build a revolutionary workers party, 70 percent black, Latino and other minority, to lead the multiracial working class and the oppressed masses in the fight to sweep away capitalist rule and its repressive apparatus, the only road to ending racist cop terror once and for all.
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