Outrage Over Police Killing of Sammy Yatim

In the early hours of Saturday, July 27, 18-year-old Sammy Yatim stood alone in an empty downtown Toronto streetcar. He had a small knife in his hand. A cop, one of about a dozen gathered near the streetcar door, pumped eight bullets into Yatim and another tasered him. They handcuffed his inert body and then, ghoulishly, performed CPR on the dying youth.

Unlike most such shootings, this one was caught on camera in all its chilling detail. The YouTube films had been viewed some one million times by July 30. The death of this young Syrian immigrant has sparked enormous anger in Toronto. On July 29, a young, racially integrated crowd of a thousand marched in a protest led by Sammy’s sister. Another protest, 500-strong, marched to police headquarters on August 13. At workplaces and in newspaper columns and letters, there has been incredulity and horror at what was manifestly a cold-blooded police execution.

Sections of the capitalist ruling class are also horrified, not by yet another death at the hands of the cops, but at the prospect that with this killing, alongside the many other police atrocities and scandals, the population is losing “due respect” for the police. Even right-wing, pro-cop columnists are cringing and venting their frustration. In response, the capitalist rulers are now invoking their time-honoured strategy for quelling outrage and regaining public trust: the inquiry. Thus, within a few short weeks of Sammy Yatim’s death, no less than three inquiries of various kinds were announced.

Ontario ombudsman André Marin will look into police “de-escalation” techniques. The chief of police has asked lawyer and retired judge Dennis O’Connor to examine the “use of force.” Notably, O’Connor’s law firm happens to represent the Toronto Police Service’s insurers who are on the hook financially for various civil suits against the cops for the “unlawful use of lethal force,” i.e., cop killings. Two weeks after Sammy Yatim was killed, an inquest into the deaths of Sylvia Klibingaitis, Reyal Jardine-Douglas and Michael Eligon—all gunned down by police in recent years—was also announced.

Over the years, there have been inquests and inquiries without end. Conducted by loyal representatives of the ruling class, the more thorough these appear, the better they serve their purpose: to prove that the system works, that justice has been served. But the police killings of black men and boys, immigrant youth, the homeless and the mentally ill do not stop.

We remember Lester Donaldson, Edmond Yu, Jeffrey Reodica, Junior Manon, Charles McGillivary, Douglas Pritchard, Byron Debassige, O’Brien Christopher-Reid, Otto Vass, Tony Andrade—just a few of those killed by police in the last 25 years. Toronto police have been involved in 44 deaths, including 15 police shootings, since 2008 alone. Yet before the killing of Sammy Yatim, only one cop was ever charged with murder, and that was thrown out by the judge. Far from dispensing justice to the victims, these inquiries exonerate the killers and the dead are instead put on trial.

“Justice for Sammy,” chanted the demonstrators as they marched through the streets of Toronto. The reality is that the capitalist system cannot and will not deliver justice to the working class and oppressed. The police, along with the prisons, courts and military, make up the core of the capitalist state, an instrument of organized violence used to maintain the rule of the capitalists against the working class. When the police kill immigrants and Native people, repress leftists and attack picket lines or student protesters, this flows directly from the fact that they serve but one master, the capitalist class. Acting as judge, jury and executioner, their job is to protect the profit system that creates unemployment, poverty and oppression.

The belief that the state can be reformed through “grassroots” campaigns, mass protest or public exposure is a deadly illusion pushed by those who defend capitalist class rule. As the Marxist leader V.I. Lenin wrote in his classic pamphlet The State and Revolution, “the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of ‘order’, which legalises and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between the classes.”

These facts are obscured by the fiction that the state is neutral and serves everyone in society equally. Toronto’s police chief, Bill Blair, captured this in his own way when he said that “You can’t police the city without the public’s consent” (Globe and Mail, 12 August). But the police have a monopoly on force and this “consent” is necessarily a political deception. This is all the more the case in a country like Canada where the naked rule of capital is masked by the trappings of parliamentary democracy.

Reformist Illusions and Political Blind Alleys

The Ontario Federation of Labour, which represents one million workers, spoke out against the killing of Sammy Yatim, and prior to the August 13 protest provided a platform for the families of many of the victims of police shootings to express their anger and bitterness. Yet in applauding the ombudsman’s inquiry and demanding yet another “independent investigation,” the OFL bureaucrats feed already rampant illusions that the capitalist state can be reformed to serve the interests of the oppressed. It is precisely the slavish adherence to the bosses’ laws by the misleaders of the union movement that has brought one defeat after another to the struggles of the working class.

The various reformist left groups gladly feed those same illusions. In their statement, “Justice for Sammy, jail the police,” the International Socialists declare that everyone should “demand the individual police officer as well as the police chief be held accountable” (socialist.ca, 29 July). The Fightback group, tireless promoters of the NDP social democrats, wants “the police put under genuine community control,” adding immediately, “Resources need to be provided so that communities can democratically provide their own security, with the assistance of the trade unions and other working-class organizations” (marxist.ca, 1 August). Rather than the necessary struggle to mobilize workers to politically oppose the ruling class and its cops, Fightback would enlist the labour movement as an adjunct to the bosses’ state.

The response of the labour bureaucrats and fake-Marxist organizations to the police execution of Sammy Yatim is a clear-cut example of the service such reformists perform for the ruling class. It works like this: there is an upsurge of anger against the capitalists’ thugs; the rulers urgently need a makeover for those thugs; then the “respectable” leftists come out, peddling their inquiries, community “accountability” and other schemes used by the rulers to diffuse and deflect social anger.

Calls for “community control” or to “jail the police” borrow from the social-democratic lie that the capitalist state can be made accountable to the “will of the people.” This state is “accountable” only to the ruling class and the justice it dispenses is bourgeois justice. The bourgeoisie will only resort to jailing one of its own police guard dogs in extremis. The furor over Sammy Yatim has been of such a magnitude that the rulers have found it necessary to make an example of the cop who pulled the trigger, so on August 19 the Special Investigations Unit charged James Forcillo with second-degree murder. In the unlikely event that this cop is convicted, this too will be done in order to restore illusions in the state as some kind of impartial arbiter.

A genuine fight against police terror must be built in implacable opposition to the capitalist state. This entails an unwavering commitment to the defense of immigrants and other oppressed minorities against the tyranny of a system based on the exploitation of human labour. To lead this fight requires a new class-struggle leadership of the labour movement and the forging of a multiracial revolutionary workers party. Workers revolution leading to the rule of the working class and the establishment of a socialist society will alone ensure justice for all workers and the oppressed. This will be a fitting memorial for Sammy Yatim and the countless other victims of police violence.