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	Workers Vanguard No. 861	6 January 2006

LBL Protests Cop Killing of Patrick Gaston

Oakland

On November 10 Patrick Gaston, a 34-year-old black man, was brutally killed in front of his mother and neighbors by Oakland police in broad daylight. Arrested for allegedly selling heroin to an undercover cop, Gaston was beaten and kicked into unconsciousness. A witness said, “I saw the police grab him, pull him off his bicycle and beat him. They beat him. They choked him. I didn’t see him fight back at all” (San Francisco Chronicle, 12 November 2005). Shouting that they were killing him, Gaston’s mother, Gwendolyn, called 911, and Patrick was pronounced dead less than an hour after he was attacked.

Gaston was killed in West Oakland, the territory of the infamous Oakland “Riders,” a gang of dozens of cops set loose in a special campaign in the racist “war on drugs.” Three Riders were brought to trial in 2002 on more than 60 counts stemming from their savage beatings and attempted frame-ups—and were acquitted in two successive trials. As a result of a civil suit, $10.5 million was awarded last June to victims of years of abuse by Oakland police. Since November 2000 a consent decree has been in effect, seeking to refurbish the Citizens’ Police Review Board (CPRB) as a “solution” to cop violence. But as Gaston’s killing shows, no number of whitewash investigations and civilian review boards can disappear the role of the murderous police.

As we wrote in “As Oakland Police Thugs Face Trial: Anger Mounts Over Cop Terror in Bay Area” (WV No. 778, 5 April 2002), “Waves of outrage against cop terror are followed by penny-ante, meaningless liberal ‘reforms,’ with the ghetto masses receding into bitterness and despair.” The cops are the hired thugs of the racist capitalist ruling class and serve to protect the system of private property.

The Bay Area Labor Black League for Social Defense submitted the following letter, as yet unpublished, to the San Francisco Bay View and Oakland Tribune on December 4. The recent attacks on Arab-owned neighborhood liquor stores in Oakland, mentioned in the letter, are alleged to be the acts of the late Yusuf Bey’s Black Muslim followers, a local group not affiliated with the Nation of Islam. For this group, selling alcohol is as much a “crime” as drug use. Such attacks benefit only the racist rulers who foster such divisions within the working and oppressed masses to maintain their power.

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Patrick Gaston was a victim of police violence targeting young black men as criminals under the guise of the “war on drugs.” The Labor Black League calls for an end to drug laws—“crimes without victims.” His generation has been deemed a surplus population by America’s rulers—no jobs, only prison hellholes or cannon fodder in imperialist wars. From the days of chattel slavery to the present, black oppression is the foundation upon which the American system of capitalist exploitation rests.

These conditions are intensified by the “war on terror” that targets immigrants, blacks and labor, tearing up rights that have been won through decades of social struggle. This year’s acquittal of the police gang, “the Riders” (named after the KKK nightriders), shows that police terror cannot be “reformed.”

In American class society, black people are segregated at the bottom, yet form a strategic part of the working class. Labor action by the powerful, racially integrated trade unions, independent of the other party of war and racism—the Democratic Party—would give an organized political expression and social power to the outrage of the black ghetto against cop terror. Such protest must also include defense of Arab store owners against vigilantism. The recent vigilante attacks on Arab-owned ghetto liquor stores, allegedly by Bey’s Black Muslims, can only fuel anti-immigrant racism. Clearly, in racist America, the immediate targets of vigilantism and state repression are black people. We need a multiracial workers party to lead the way.