Remember Aiyana Stanley-Jones

Detroit Cops Kill Seven-Year-Old in Her Home

She went to sleep with her grandmother in her family’s home. Her father covered her with her favorite blanket before he retired for the evening. It was her last night. Her name was Aiyana, she was seven years old, and she was fatally shot by Detroit police in the early morning hours of May 16.

The cop killing of this black girl was no aberration, but in fact a particularly grotesque and stark example of the state of siege that now defines life in Detroit, especially for its black population. The cops, including members of the “Special Response Team” (SRT, Detroit’s SWAT outfit), raided Aiyana’s home in military fashion, supposedly to arrest a homicide suspect. The cops threw a flash grenade through a window, stormed the house and shot the child. Aiyana’s grandmother, Mertilla Jones, testified at a news conference: “Soon as they hit the window, I hit the floor and went to reach for my granddaughter.” Jones said that she saw the light leave her eyes: “I knew she was dead” (New York Times, 21 May). An attorney for the family, Geoffrey Fieger, noted that he had seen videotape showing that “a percussion grenade device was thrown through the front window and a shot was fired immediately from the outside from the porch” (CNN.com, 17 May).

The video exists because the cops busted into the house with an A&E (Arts and Entertainment) television crew filming for The First 48 reality show in tow. The video is now the property of the Michigan State Police, who have been charged with “investigating” the cops’ action. All this promises is the usual whitewash of one arm of the racist capitalist state by another. In fact, so desperate were they to cover up the killing that police arrested the grieving Mertilla Jones and held her for nearly 12 hours that Sunday, subjecting her to drug testing and a chemical test to detect any presence of gunpowder on her hands! Only afterwards was the name of the SRT officer who shot Aiyana leaked. Fieger has filed lawsuits in U.S. District Court and Wayne County Circuit Court claiming civil rights violations, gross negligence and conspiracy by police to hide the facts of the case. Aiyana’s family deserves any recompense it seeks for its unspeakable loss.

Home invasions by the cops—unannounced, with weapons drawn—were already routine in Detroit. After one cop was killed and five others wounded on May 3 in an early morning raid on an abandoned house on the city’s East Side, police spokesmen and black Democratic mayor David Bing ratcheted up calls to “fight crime” through jacking up police operations. The bosses’ media did their part in whipping up an “anti-crime” frenzy. Tension was palpable, the result horrific.

This was only the immediate backdrop for the killing of Aiyana by the cops. Vicious racist police repression is the daily reality for the oppressed black masses of this devastated city. The auto industry once employed millions in the U.S., and the heavily black unionized workforce in Detroit was a vanguard of some of the most militant labor struggles in the country. It was Motor City, with comparatively decent wages won through hard struggle. The mass of black auto workers also represented a vital link between the power of the organized proletariat and the impoverished ghetto masses. Today, the auto industry and its union presence have been decimated by the capitalist owners of industry, abetted by a cravenly class-collaborationist union bureaucracy. This has left the city a hellhole of mass unemployment and desperate poverty, its black population all the more vulnerable to the repressive powers of the capitalist state (see “Reporter’s Notebook: Devastation in Motor City,” WV No. 929, 30 January 2009).

Not only in Detroit, but throughout inner cities and former industrial concentrations across the country, the economic whip of unemployment has been augmented by the vast expansion of police powers and prisons, first under the “war on crime” and especially later with the “war on drugs.” Beginning in the 1980s, the racist “anti-drug” campaign fueled a historic rise in the prison population. From about 40,000 people incarcerated for drug offenses in 1980, there has been a more than twelve-fold increase to over 500,000 today, with black people accounting for more than 60 percent of the total.

The mass incarceration of blacks and also Latinos was overseen by Republican and Democratic presidents alike and enforced at every level of the government, including by Detroit’s Democratic Party city administrations, from Coleman Young to David Bing. Black Democratic politicians like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton early on placed themselves in the forefront of this racist drive. Now Barack Obama, like George W. Bush before him, has used the pretense of a global “war on drugs” to expand U.S. imperialism’s military presence around the world, to back death squads in Colombia and to jack up racist anti-immigrant repression along the Mexican border. We say: Decriminalize drugs—down with all laws against “crimes without victims”!

Now, in an effort to divert anger in Detroit over the killing of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Democratic Congressman John Conyers Jr. has requested that the Department of Justice launch an investigation. But if the Feds step in, it will be to rehabilitate the city cops so that they can better go about their job, which is to terrorize black and poor neighborhoods and repress labor struggle. This system of racist capitalist repression—cops, courts and prisons—cannot be reformed to serve the interests of the exploited and oppressed. The only way to get rid of cop terror is the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist profit system, for which the gangs in blue are the front line of defense.

Meanwhile, the grieving family invited Sharpton to give the eulogy for Aiyana. Obscenely, Sharpton used the occasion to blame the victims of murderous cop terror. This former FBI fink intoned: “I’d rather tell you to start looking at the man in the mirror. We’ve all done something that contributed to this.”

The embattled masses of Detroit don’t need to look at “the man in the mirror”—they need the mobilization of the multiracial working class at the head of the oppressed in struggle against police violence, chronic unemployment, austerity, crumbling hospitals and schools. They need a militant union leadership to turn around the one-sided class war that has been ruthlessly waged by the capitalist rulers. They do not need capitalist Democratic Party politicians who parade themselves as friends of workers and minorities and then turn around and pimp off their misery and their tragedies. They need a revolutionary workers party to lead the struggle against black oppression—the cornerstone of American capitalism—which can be eradicated only through socialist revolution. Justice and equality can be accomplished only by smashing the capitalist state, expropriating the bloodsucking capitalists and establishing workers rule. This is the fight to which the Spartacist League is dedicated.