Contemporary Police Brutality and Misconduct.

[NOTE: The statement below is from an extended background version of the BRC Anti-Police Brutality & Misconduct Petition. A shorter version of this petition, intended for the gathering of signatures, can be downloaded from the web site: http://www.blackradicalcongress.org]

"Our lives, our homes, our liberties each day are made less secure because of unrestrained and unpunished police brutality."--National Negro Congress, Petition Against Police Brutality, 1938.

In the late sixties, Jamil Al-Amin (a.k.a. H. Rap Brown) declared, "Violence is as American as cherry pie." Al-Amin's statement underscores the essential role of violence in maintaining systems of racial oppression in the United States. Racist violence was fundamental to the creation of the United States. Moreover, force and violence are not options but necessary to the maintenance of racial oppression. Racist violence is the scaffolding upon which capitalist exploitation and white supremacy are erected.

Racist violence has both structural and physical components and it operates in both the public and private spheres. Structural violence refers to the "impersonal" violence inflicted upon people of color and the poor by profit-oriented enterprises and institutions. It involves the indirect violence caused by institutional policies and programs that produce, maintain, and rationalize poverty, inadequate health care, and substandard housing.

Public racist violence refers to structural and physical violence initiated, perpetuated, and justified by the government. Private racist violence describes the racially motivated physical and structural violence of private citizens and persons. People of color have been the victims of systematic public and spontaneous private violence since the slave trade and the colonial conquest of the Americas. Privately initiated racist violence has taken the form of genocidal invasions, rapacious slaving raids, savage slave whipping, and repressive white capping, lynching, race riots, and hate crimes. Although private violence is crucial to the maintenance of racial oppression, it has always supplemented state-sponsored (government) racist violence.

Over the last 500 years people of color, especially African Americans, have endured a pattern of state-sanctioned violence, and civil and human rights abuse. To enforce capitalist exploitation and racial oppression the government and its police, courts, prisons, and military have beaten, framed, murdered and executed private persons, and brutally repressed struggles for freedom, justice, and self-determination. It has initiated wars of conquest, launched man-hunts for fugitive slaves, suppressed slave revolts, brutalized demonstrators, and assassinated political dissidents.

Police brutality describes "instances of serious physical or psychological harm to civilians."...