Orange County Outrage

Cops Acquitted in Savage Killing of Homeless Man

LOS ANGELES—On January 13, former Fullerton cops Manuel Ramos and Jay Cicinelli, who led the police charge in the barbaric fatal beating of Kelly Thomas, a homeless white man, walked free out of court. The savagery of the 5 July 2011 assault was captured on 33 minutes of surveillance video that show cops landing blow after blow against an unarmed Thomas, who suffered from schizophrenia. This footage has sparked outrage on the streets, in the press and on the Internet, where it gained wide attention after WikiLeaks tweeted the entire video to 2.1 million followers. As Kelly’s father, Ron Thomas (himself a former Orange County sheriff’s deputy), warned: “This is carte blanche to police officers to do whatever they want.”

The 2011 video shows the two officers confronting Thomas in the parking lot of a Fullerton transit station after a call to the police from a local bar was “embellished” with the false accusation that Thomas was trying to break into parked cars. Ramos put on latex gloves and told Thomas: “Now you see my fists?... They’re getting ready to f--- you up.” A gang of six cops proceeded to taser Thomas multiple times and bash his skull with the taser and batons as he cried out in pain, repeatedly apologized and gasped that he could not breathe. Finally, he screamed, “Dad, they are killing me!” Thomas, who suffered broken facial bones and a compressed thorax, was knocked into a coma and died five days later.

In an attempt to defuse anger a couple months after the fatal attack, Ramos was charged with murder in the second degree and involuntary manslaughter and Cicinelli with involuntary manslaughter and excessive use of force. The murder charge was a first for an active duty cop in the conservative “law and order” enclave of Orange County. Charges were brought against a third cop but dropped shortly after the “not guilty” verdict was read for Ramos and Cicinelli.

On January 18, some 200 people gathered in front of the Fullerton police station to protest the outcome of the trial. The cops responded with a show of force and ended up arresting ten people for “failure to disperse” and two for vandalism. We demand: Drop the charges now! Another protester was arrested for allegedly assaulting a news videographer.

Police violence is endemic to this capitalist society. Reformist socialists, though, peddle fantasies in the “people” bringing the cops to heel. One refrain is for an all-civilian review board. As the Party for Socialism and Liberation put it at the time the cops were charged, such a board “would have the power to fire officers, impose sanctions, or even file criminal charges in cases where police act out of line” (Liberation, 23 September 2011). The notion that the guard dogs of the capitalist order can be cleaned up and made accountable to the exploited and oppressed masses is a dangerous lie. In fact, if the defense counsellors said one thing truthful, it was when Ramos’ attorney John Barnett (who also defended one of the cops involved in the 1991 beating of Rodney King) told reporters that these cops “were doing their jobs...they did what they were trained to do.”

As the paid enforcers of capitalist rule, the cops brutalize the outcasts of this oppressive and massively unequal society, especially black and Latino youth in the inner cities. Meanwhile, the capitalist masters, who treat the penniless and downtrodden dumped in the streets as beneath contempt, take the ax to social programs for the homeless, the elderly, the mentally ill and the disabled. Access to basic human necessities such as health care, a good education and decent housing should be an elementary right for everyone, not just those who can afford it.

But such a massive reallocation of wealth and resources can be achieved only by ripping power out of the hands of the bloodsucking capitalist class and creating a socialist society where production is for human need, not profit. For that to happen, the anger of the ghettos and barrios, which seethe daily under the boot of the thugs in blue, must be linked to the social power of the multiracial working class mobilized in class-struggle opposition to the capitalist state. What is needed is a revolutionary workers party to lead the way to uprooting this system of exploitation and oppression and the cop terror that defends it.