Racist Cops Kill Stephon Clark

Black Sacramento Seethes

The mounting toll of death at the hands of the racist cops has become horrifyingly routine. But for Sacramento’s embattled black population, the police killing of yet another unarmed black man, 22-year-old Stephon Clark, was one too many. A father of two, Clark was gunned down in a hail of 20 police bullets on March 18 as he stood in the backyard of his grandmother’s Sacramento home. Backed by a police helicopter, two cops—one black and one white—cornered Clark as he tried to enter the house in the heavily minority Meadowview neighborhood where he had often stayed. Within seconds Clark, who was holding his cell phone, had been executed. A recently released independent autopsy report showed that of the eight bullets that hit him, six were fired into his back.

Chanting “cells up, don’t shoot,” protesters hit the streets to express their rage. On March 22, the day after graphic videos of the shooting were released, and again five days later, hundreds blocked the entrance to the city’s Golden 1 Center sports arena where the Sacramento Kings were playing. Inside, during warm-up basketball players wore T-shirts in Clark’s honor. Elsewhere in the city, black youth faced off against phalanxes of riot cops. The protests have defiantly continued almost daily, and hundreds came out for Clark’s funeral on March 29.

Adding to the anger was the usual attempted cover-up as the cops tried to vilify Clark as the criminal. Caught out in their lie that Clark had a gun, the cops then claimed that they thought his cell phone looked like one. Sacramento mayor Darrell Steinberg, a liberal Democrat and advocate of “community policing,” initially argued that he “cannot second guess the split-second decisions of our officers.” With the outburst of protest, Steinberg beat a hasty retreat, saying that the cop killing of Clark was “just plain wrong.” At a March 27 city council meeting, the mayor appealed to the hundreds of black people who packed the room for “peace, justice and change.”

An anguished and angry Stevante Clark, Stephon’s brother, punctured Steinberg’s hypocrisy. Taking over the podium, he pointed to the desperate poverty of Sacramento’s black population and shouted, “The chief of police got my brother killed.” Tanya Faison, a founder of Black Lives Matter (BLM) Sacramento, which has organized most of the protests, said, “It feels like genocide.” On the night of March 31, a cop car accelerated and hit a well-known 61-year-old activist before speeding off, sending her to the hospital for head and wrist injuries.

The difference between the police harassment and targeting of BLM protesters and the courtesy afforded to the March 24 “March for Our Lives” has not been lost on black protesters. While an invitation to the Sacramento “March for Our Lives” rally had been extended to BLM, an exchange on the rally organizers’ Facebook page echoed the cops’ violence-baiting of BLM, contemptuously warning, “as long as they are peaceful & non distracting they are welcome”!

Police Reform Scam

Speaking at the city council meeting, Betty Williams, president of the Greater Sacramento NAACP, pointed to the case of Donald Venerable, another black man shot to death while holding a cell phone by the Sacramento cops back in 1999. Despite various “police reform” schemes, including body cameras and the creation of a Community Police Commission, nothing has changed. Nor did having black faces in high places—like Steinberg’s predecessor Kevin Johnson, who was mayor from 2008 to 2016—make any difference. In the last three years, seven black men have been killed by the cops in the Sacramento area. Others, like Nandi Cain, are routinely brutalized. Walking home from work, Cain was jumped and slammed to the ground by a Sacramento cop, punched in the face 20 times and then thrown into an isolation cell for nine hours for the “crime” of jaywalking. Promises for change came with the appointment of Daniel Hahn as Sacramento’s first black police chief last August. But that illusion was shattered in the hail of police bullets that killed Stephon Clark.

On the streets there is a determination that “this has to stop.” But the solutions pushed by the NAACP and a parade of black preachers—respectfully submitted to the very city officials who have presided over the carnage perpetrated by the Sacramento police—amount to yet another cycle of meaningless reforms that only end up giving the racist killers in blue a fresh coat of whitewash. They appeal to the rulers that the police be held “accountable” for their crimes as if it were simply a matter of firing or convicting a few bad apples.

Black Lives Matter demands that the county DA prosecute the cops who executed Clark. With the police who killed Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and others getting off without even a slap on the wrist, it is by now well known that the chance of a cop being charged, much less convicted, is rare to nonexistent. Amid the Sacramento protests, Louisiana state officials announced that the Baton Rouge cops who killed Alton Sterling in 2016 will face no charges.

One black woman, a student at UC Berkeley, took apart the litany of police reform pleas at the March 27 city council meeting by rightly making the point that in terrorizing black people the cops are “doing their job”—a job rooted in the history of this country where “the function of the police was to brutalize, was to captivate, was to enslave, was to kill black people.” She went on to demand the “complete abolition” of the cops, a call that has been echoed by BLM in Sacramento.

The call to abolish the police raises the question of who can bring that about. Along with the courts, the prisons and military, the cops make up the armed core of the capitalist state whose very purpose is the violent and brutal suppression of the working class, black people, immigrants and all the oppressed. No capitalist government—city, state or federal—is going to disarm, much less abolish, the very armed thugs the capitalist class relies on to maintain its rule. Nor can the police be made to “serve the people” with some kind of “community-based” operation. A cop is a cop, and their job is the same no matter the color of their skin or the neighborhood they come from.

After black people, the chief target of racist police terror in California is the Latino population. In the state’s Central Valley, where Sacramento is located, agribusiness profits are squeezed from the blood and toil of mostly Mexican and Central American workers, whose historic struggles to organize unions faced brutal police attacks. Like a pre-Civil War slave catcher, Sacramento County’s racist sheriff, Scott Jones, grooves on helping I.C.E. round up undocumented immigrants. Only three weeks before Stephon Clark was executed, police in Gilroy, south of San Jose, beat, tased and choked to death Latino construction worker Steven Juarez.

Racist police terror in Sacramento also serves as the handmaiden of the city rulers’ gentrification schemes. The 2008-09 financial crisis devastated minority neighborhoods like Meadowview with foreclosures and unemployment. Now black people are being driven out as house prices and rents skyrocket with the influx of those fleeing the astronomical housing costs in the San Francisco Bay Area. Last summer, the police and sheriff sent a surge of cops to “saturate” the historically black Oak Park neighborhood, once the site of the Sacramento office of the Black Panther Party, in order to clean up the streets for profitable “renewal.”

The war against black people in American society is wielded by the capitalist exploiters to divide and conquer their wage slaves and thus increasingly drive up the exploitation of the multiracial working class. Integrated unions like SEIU Local 1000, which represents California state employees, not only have the power to shut down Sacramento but also provide a vital link to defending the black and Latino poor. However, not only have the SEIU misleaders taken no action in defense of the city’s besieged black population, they have actively recruited cops and prison guards into the union. Such betrayals, together with the bureaucracy’s allegiance to the capitalist Democratic Party, have assisted in the bosses’ ongoing war against the unions and have left the black and Latino masses defenseless in the face of police terror.

Police brutality and killings will not be eliminated short of doing away with the entire system of racist American capitalism, which is built on the foundation of black oppression. A multiracial, revolutionary workers party that champions the cause of black freedom and the liberation of all the oppressed can be forged only in political combat against the misleaders of labor. Led by such a party, the victorious workers revolution will shatter the power of the racist rulers and their state. International workers rule will lay the basis for eradicating all inequalities based on class and race by using the wealth of this country and all the world for the benefit of those whose labor produces it.