This originally aired on The Final Straw radio show.

Let’s talk about Ferguson MO. A Black unarmed teen was shot repeatedly by a white officer while Brown had his arms in the air. Since then, an angry community has been protesting, which led to small scale rioting and looting. To talk about the situation in Ferguson honestly though, I think we’d have to talk about it in a broader context. A couple years back I wrote a piece called, “On the Morality of Killing Police” which is still posted at SeanSwain.org. I wrote that in response to a good friend of mine being brutally and unnecessarily assaulted by a St Louis police officer. I argued then that it’s a legitimate question to ask whether defense of human life necessitates the pro-active and pre-emptive killing of police.
The fact that I wrote that for posting two years ago demonstrates that the rampant problem of sadistic and over-aggressive trigger happy cops in the St Louis area is not a new phenomenon. And to revisit my argument from that article, consider: if that cop who committed the most recent shooting had been found dead in his police cruiser after I wrote that article, Michael Brown would still be alive.
I’m not advocating the killing of police, because you probably can’t do that on the air, even if it makes perfect practical sense, and besides, I already did that on my site. All I’m saying is, when it comes to white cops and black teens, increasing the body count of one will lower the body count of the other. Something else I wrote a long time ago was entitled “Justice for Trayvon Martin?” It makes this feel like Deja Vu all over again. Trayvon was killed over a hoody and a bag of skittles. Michael Brown over a cigar. In both cases, community leaders called for calm and urged angry communities to be responsible and peaceful. Those so-called community leaders, marched out before the world by the same guns and badges that do the killing insist that angry crowds should let the proper authorities handle the investigation and that everyone should return to their assigned seats to await some final verdict.
That’s what so-called community leaders advocated when cops gunned down Amadiou Diallo in the doorway of his home, shooting him forty-one times, including bullets embedded in the soles of his feet, fired after he had already fallen. Or when they gunned down Oscar Grant, cuffed and face down, pleading with cops on behalf of his baby girl at home. Or Malice Green… Or Michael Pipkin… Or those two young people in Cleveland, where cops fired 187 shots into their car and liquefied them. All because they were poor and their car backfired.
The list goes on and on, like the rolls of victims in a concentration camp, only the concentration camp is the United States.
Community leaders advocating calm and advising protesters to be peaceful couldn’t be more irresponsible. We know what that leads to. Defusing an angry community is a guarantee that the situation won’t change. Community leaders words of calm and peace effectively load the bullets into the cops’ pistols for the next shooting and the next… Calls for calm and peace are complicity for Michael Brown’s murder, and the next one.
Calm. Peaceful. Right.
The official talking heads and community leaders once again urge recourse to official processes and investigations and inquiry and judicial proceedings designed to achieve justice for Michael Brown. Justice for a kid shot multiple times with his hands in the air, as if this illusive and foreign concept called justice can make up for the absence of life. A nation of mass graves covered in justice.
Just look at those cops in Ferguson perched atop military combat vehicles, staring down sights of advanced weapons, rolling out mechanized hardware against a black community tired of burying their unarmed kids.
Calm? Peaceful? Are you serious?
To make it worse, some misdirected attention, claiming the real problem is a shortage of Black cops, that recruitment of Blacks to the police force is a fix, as if hiring a token number of desperate poor Blacks to participate in the slaughter of other desperate poor Blacks somehow makes it better.
On orders of president Obama, somewhere in Iraq, on some stupid mountain in the middle of nowhere, some tiny religious group nobody ever heard of is receiving a US air drop to save them from genocide carried out by evil extremists. So I gotta ask, when is the federal government going to air drop weapons to the black community of Ferguson so they can save themselves from the evil extremists carrying out a genocide on them? Parachutes bring hope to Faluja, we don’t find either one in Ferguson.
In the absence of parachutes and hope, direct action and rebellion are the only rational response. No justice. No peace. Fuck the police.

This is anarchist prisoner Sean Swain from Ohio’s supermax facility, if you’re listening you are the resistance.