NYPD Guns Down 66-Year-Old Black Woman

Her name was Deborah Danner. She was a 66-year-old black woman, who struggled with mental illness for three decades. On October 18, cops responding to a 911 call forced their way into her apartment in the Bronx. NYPD sergeant Hugh Barry shot Danner twice in her own bedroom, fatally wounding her. Cops alleged that Danner threatened Barry with a pair of scissors and later swung a bat. The truth is she was executed for being mentally ill and black.

Danner’s death was chillingly foreshadowed in an essay she wrote in 2012 titled “Living with Schizophrenia.” She described the grueling reality for people with mental illness who often end up socially isolated, with inadequate medical treatment (or no treatment at all), unemployed and/or homeless. Danner wrote, “We are all aware of the all too frequent news stories about the mentally ill who come up against law enforcement instead of mental health professionals and end up dead.” According to data compiled by the Washington Post, nearly a quarter of people shot and killed by cops in 2016 were mentally ill. This violent repression attests to the attitude of the capitalist rulers, who view many people—especially the poor, black and mentally ill—as expendable.

Danner’s essay invoked Eleanor Bumpurs, a 66-year-old mentally ill black woman who was killed by the racist cops almost exactly 32 years before Danner was. Bumpurs was confronted in her Bronx apartment by a dozen cops equipped with mace, U-shaped steel “restraining bars,” riot shields and bulletproof vests because she had fallen behind on her rent. One cop pumped two shotgun blasts into her.

At the time of Bumpurs’s killing, the mayor of New York City was the racist pig Ed Koch, who positively grooved on the repression and suffering of black people and Latinos. Today’s mayor, Democrat Bill de Blasio, was elected on promises of enacting reforms that would benefit minorities and the poor. Did his election end up mattering for people like Deborah Danner? Certainly not. Different mayor, same old story. De Blasio vows to never have another killing like Danner’s happen again. Two years ago he said the same thing about Eric Garner. Like Sergeant Barry, Garner’s killer Daniel Pantaleo, was put on desk duty. Since that time Pantaleo has been rewarded with around $65,000 in overtime and other earnings on top of his salary, though he remains under federal investigation.

On October 25, the Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA) placed a full-page ad in the New York Times, in which SBA president Ed Mullins lashed out at de Blasio and Police Commissioner James O’Neill for criticizing the police. Mullins justified the grotesque killing of Danner by portraying her as a deadly threat. The real deadly threat is the trigger-happy cops! Whenever the thugs in blue get any criticism, they howl and bark about being “victims,” seeking to advance their bonapartist agenda to stand above law as judge, jury and executioner.

It’s been two years since Black Lives Matter protests sprang onto the national scene after the racist cop killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Protests against cop terror have shined a light on the racist reality of American capitalism. But the reality is that these protests cannot stop cop terror.

Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained that the police are “a professional caste of men trained in the practice of violence upon the poor.” The cops’ role is to execute capitalist “law and order” by breaking strikes, terrorizing the ghettos, raiding immigrant homes, repressing protests, etc. They are a crucial part of the capitalist state apparatus—together with the military, prisons and courts—the purpose of which is to maintain the dictatorship of the capitalist class.

To sweep away the vicious cop thugs and the capitalist system they “serve and protect” will take a socialist revolution. As Marxists we say the working class is the only force that can overthrow capitalism. To make the working class conscious of its role as the gravedigger of capitalism requires the intervention of a vanguard party that will fuse the power of the working class to the anger of the ghettos and barrios. This is the party the Spartacist League seeks to build.