Cop Who Killed Oscar Grant Gets Slap on Wrist

Oakland Protesters Brave Racist Hysteria, Cop Riot

OAKLAND—In the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 2009, Johannes Mehserle, a white Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer, gunned down Oscar Grant III, a young black apprentice grocery butcher and father of a four-year-old girl. The killing was witnessed by dozens of train passengers and recorded by cell phones and BART’s own video cameras. Mehserle shot Grant pointblank in the back while Grant lay prone on a BART station platform, pinned down by another cop calling him a “bitch ass n----r.” This July 8, Mehserle was given a slap on the wrist for the brazenly racist killing. He was found guilty of “involuntary manslaughter” by a jury that included not a single black person, in a trial that was moved from Oakland, where the killing had sparked massive outrage, to Los Angeles thanks to the machinations of the Oakland city government under black Democratic mayor Ron Dellums.

At the trial, Mehserle’s lawyer argued: “Police officers are different…. We give them guns and tell them to use those guns.” This racist atrocity certainly bears that out. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Mehserle testifying that he thought Grant “might be going for a gun” and that he only meant to use his taser. This is hardly believable. Mehserle’s gun weighed over two and a half pounds while the taser weighed less than a pound, and the weapons were kept on opposite sides of his body. Mehserle went so far as to handcuff Grant after the fatal shot. There can be no doubt: Oscar Grant was executed in cold blood. Due for sentencing on November 5, Mehserle may face as little as probation with no prison time.

On the evening of the verdict, a multiracial crowd of some 1,000 people gathered in downtown Oakland not only to voice their outrage over the outcome of the trial but to protest the police terror and racist oppression that is the daily reality for black people and other minorities. Protesters held signs reading, “We Are All Oscar Grant!” The Bay Area Spartacist League and Labor Black League for Social Defense joined the protest, while the L.A. Spartacist League joined a protest in that city the same evening.

In Oakland, an army of riot cops mobilized from 15 different police agencies (with 20,000 National Guardsmen on standby) descended upon the protesters. The cop action had been rehearsed in a “simulation” weeks before, where plainclothes cops posed as protesters and threw objects at officers. The bourgeois media did its part to vilify protesters, whipping up bigoted, sensationalist hysteria about impending violence by “anarchist” rioters and flashing scenes of people hurriedly fleeing heavily black Oakland the day of the verdict.

The stage was set for cop provocations and attacks. A siren-blaring squad car hit a deaf woman protester. Walter Riley, a local black civil rights attorney, was choked and arrested as he tried to enter his own office. Some 78 protesters were arrested, many charged with “failure to disperse” and several with trumped-up felonies. We demand: Drop all charges and free all jailed protesters now!

As the Partisan Defense Committee wrote in a July 13 protest letter to the Alameda County District Attorney, the lurid stories of outsiders fomenting “violence” in Oakland were “a direct echo of the forces of racist reaction in the Jim Crow South who branded civil rights movement activists as ‘outside agitators.’ In fact, the assault on and arrest of protesters in Oakland on the night of July 8 is just the latest vindictive attempt by Mayor Dellums and his cops to silence and intimidate those who would protest rampant, racist police terror.”

As one protester put it, “We’ve been suffering police brutality for generations.... We want it to end.” Generations have indeed been suffering the racist oppression of black people that is rooted in American capitalism, enforced by both the Democratic and Republican parties of capital. The story has played out again and again. A cop kills a black person. In the rare instance when the cop is made to face charges, the venue is changed to ensure a jury with no black people. The cop, if convicted of anything, gets the most minimal sentence. Anger erupts, and to head this off, Democratic politicians and their water boys on the reformist left offer means to “reform” the justice system—federal “investigations,” appeals to the courts to jail killer cops, community “oversight” and “control” of the police.

Their purpose is to lull the working class and minorities into believing that this racist injustice system can be reformed to serve the exploited and the oppressed. The cops are the hired guns of the capitalist ruling class. Their job is to uphold racist capitalist “law and order” through brute force: breaking strikes, rounding up ghetto and barrio youth, repressing social protest. The courts, to which many are looking for some justice, are an essential part of this murderous repressive machinery. Capitalist “law and order” is based on frame-ups, lies and police violence. There will be no end to racist cop terror, no justice for working people and the oppressed, until the multiracial proletariat takes power through a socialist revolution that destroys the capitalists’ entire apparatus of state repression.

An intended result of police “reform” schemes is to channel anger over their racist atrocities into the electoral con game of bourgeois “lesser evilism”—i.e., support to the Democratic Party. Right on cue, Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee issued an appeal to Barack Obama’s Justice Department to investigate civil rights violations in the killing of Oscar Grant. Mayor Dellums, who oversees cop repression as the city’s chief executive, supported Lee’s appeal. The reformist left, which almost to a man championed the election of Obama as imperialist Commander-in-Chief as a victory for the workers and oppressed, has been singing much the same song.

Take the International Socialist Organization (ISO). After the capitalist media smeared protesters as rioters and looters, the ISO’s Socialist Worker (9 July) outrageously intoned: “If politicians truly cared about violence after the verdict, they could have taken a few more positive steps”! Parroting Lee and Dellums’ call for federal intervention, the article complains that “there is no independent BART police oversight board.” In fact, Oakland and the cities surrounding it have served as a virtual laboratory for such liberal schemes, starting in the 1970s when Berkeley established the first police review board in the country. That never stopped Berkeley cops from killing black people with impunity. Ditto for the Oakland Citizens’ Police Review Board established in 1980 following a police killing spree that took the lives of nine black people the previous year.

In the same vein, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) calls for “community control” of the police and declares in a statement for its gubernatorial election campaign on the petty-bourgeois Peace and Freedom Party ticket that “cops who violate civil rights and murder working-class youth should be jailed” (PSLweb.org, 16 July). The call to “jail the killer cops” has been raised by the PSL, the ISO, the dubious Bolshevik Tendency and many other groups. Reinforcing the liberal lie that the state can be cleaned up and made accountable to the “will of the people,” this demand channels anger over cop terror right back into the very “justice” system that upholds state violence in every way. The ISO adds the absurd demand to “disarm all the police,” as if the capitalists would ever give up the apparatus of organized violence by which they defend their rule and profits.

The courts almost always let the cops off on the grounds that they’re just “doing their job.” On the rare occasion when the rulers find it necessary to punish one of their murderous gendarmes, the purpose is to refurbish the image of the state and its armed bodies of men. The bourgeoisie occasionally upholds the pretense of “justice” in order to put a gloss on a social order based on class exploitation and oppression. We noted in an article on Oscar Grant’s killing in WV No. 928 (16 January 2009): “Even if one cop were charged and imprisoned, it wouldn’t stop police brutality and terror. The cops serve, together with the military and the prisons, as the core of a state whose purpose is the repression of the working class and oppressed by any means necessary.”

Our perspective is the mobilization of the working class at the head of the oppressed, independent from all capitalist parties, politicians and the state. As the Bay Area Labor Black League wrote in a 12 January 2009 statement following Oscar Grant’s killing:

“The mass outrage against cop terror needs an organized political expression, and not one that strengthens the hand of the Democratic Party, the political tool of the very capitalist rulers whose interests the cops ‘serve and protect.’ The Labor Black League for Social Defense fights to link the anger of the ghettos and barrios to the power of our class, the multiracial labor movement. Labor protest by the Bay Area’s powerful and multiracial unions—starting with the BART transit unions and including longshore, grocery, city and other workers—would provide the social power of a working-class political axis.”

What prevents labor from waging such struggle are the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats, who have shackled the workers to their class enemies, including by organizing cops—the sworn enemies of labor and blacks—into the unions. The same SEIU union that organizes BART maintenance workers and Oakland city workers includes the BART cops! We demand: Cops out of the unions!

Addressing the July 8 Oakland protest, a Spartacist spokesman declared, “We fight to build a revolutionary leadership to unite labor and all the oppressed to get rid of the entire capitalist system.” Our speaker continued: “In a Socialist America we can use the wealth created by the working class to open the road to freedom from exploitation and racial oppression for good! The Spartacist League is dedicated to building a workers party that can lead this fight. Racist cop terror, we say no! This whole damn system’s got to go!”