Anaheim: Outrage Over Cop Killings

JULY 30—Residents of working-class Anaheim, just southeast of Los Angeles, are seething in the wake of two coldblooded killings of Latino youth by the racist cops. On July 21, police shot Manuel Diaz in the back and, as he fell to his knees, again in the back of the head. With the unarmed Diaz on the brink of death, the cops slapped handcuffs on him. After pushing back people in the area who were trying to help Diaz, the cops then offered them money to get them to turn over any cellphone videos of the incident. The next day, the thugs in blue gunned down Joel Acevedo after they claimed that he had stolen an SUV and fired on the police. But a witness has come forward stating that she heard only five consecutive shots, not an exchange of gunfire.

There have been eight shootings by Anaheim cops so far this year, five of them fatal. All but one of those killed were Latino. As one resident said, “This is not quite ‘The Happiest Place on Earth,’ and now the world knows it.” Despite the Disneyland facade, this Orange County city of some 340,000 is starkly race-divided. While white families are concentrated in the upscale “planned community” of Anaheim Hills, most of the city’s majority-Latino population lives in the poor section of town known as the Flatlands. Young men there describe being constantly stopped and harassed by the cops for doing nothing more than walking down the street.

For four days after the killing of Diaz, hundreds of angry people from the neighborhood staged protests. In a reference to the cops labeling the victims as “documented gang members,” supposedly at fault for their own deaths, one demonstrator carried a placard reading: “#1 Gang Here is the Police.” On the first day of protests, police fired beanbags and pepper-spray pellets and “accidentally” unleashed an attack dog that injured many in the crowd after heading straight for a baby—who was saved only by the actions of others.

At the largest protest, on July 24, many demonstrators who sought entry into a City Council meeting on the killings were barred and again brutally attacked by the cops. The Spartacist League attended this protest with placards reading: “For Mass Labor Protest Against Racist Cop Terror! Manuel Diaz, Oscar Grant—We Will Not Forget!” and “Break with the Democrats!—Party of Racism and War! For a Workers Party that Fights for Socialist Revolution.”

Dozens of demonstrators have been arrested, some on charges that include assault with a deadly weapon. Meanwhile, the city police chief railed that “the vast majority” of protesters were “from outside” Anaheim and had come “to create havoc, damage property, cause injuries and in effect just attack the democratic way.” During the night of July 23-24, the L.A. office of the leftist ANSWER coalition, which had participated in the Anaheim protests, was ransacked. Drop all charges against the protesters!

A number of protesters, as well as the reformists of the International Socialist Organization in a 30 July article on their Web site, have called for the establishment of a civilian review board. This demand is based on the liberal illusion that the bourgeois state, namely the cops together with the courts, prisons and military, can be cleaned up and made accountable to “the people.” In fact, the purpose of the state is the repression of the working class and oppressed in defense of the interests of the capitalists. Civilian review boards have been around in this country since the first one was set up in Berkeley in the early 1970s. Today, according to government estimates, there are about 100 of them in cities across the country. Of course, that has done nothing to stop cops in the ghettos and barrios from blowing away blacks, Latinos and others with virtual impunity.

Placards at the Anaheim protests by the reformist Party for Socialism and Liberation called to “Jail Killer Cops!” This demand helps to channel anger over cop terror right back into the very “justice” system that upholds its monopoly of violence in every way. On the rare occasions when the rulers find it necessary to punish one of their murderous gendarmes, the aim is to refurbish the image of the state and its armed bodies of men in order to make it more effective. That is the goal of the investigation by the U.S. Attorney of the killings of Diaz and Acevedo that was announced last week, which was requested by both the Anaheim city council and the Republican mayor.

Anger burns in the ghettos and barrios all over this country. But to effect any fundamental change, it must be linked to the social power of the multiracial working class, mobilized in class-struggle opposition to the capitalist state and all of its political parties. There will be no end to police terror short of the destruction of this system of exploitation and oppression—which is what the cops truly “serve and protect.” Our purpose is to build the revolutionary workers party that can lead the fight for a socialist America. Only then will there be justice for working people and the oppressed.