Originally aired on The Final Straw

[Please view Sean’s open letter discussing possible legal issues with this post.]

March 15, the international day against police violence. In the U.S., you’ll see people marching and protesting, maybe even getting really radical and being arrested for nonviolent resistance, laying in front of cop cars or chaining themselves to the doors of the local cop shops. In places that are already ground zero for a lot of police hostility, like Ferguson perhaps, you might see sporadic attacks on police that are more than symbolic. Maybe not.
It’s interesting, I think, that there is such a thing as an International Day Against Police Violence. I’m not aware of an International Day Against Electrician Violence, for instance. And I’ve also never heard of an International Day Against Plumber Violence. To my knowledge there’s no International Day Against Teacher Violence.
I’m no statistics expert but I would suggest to you that there are more nurses in the world than police, and probably more secretaries, but we don’t need a day to protest the random killings carried out by nurses or secretaries. We don’t need a day to voice our rage about nur secretaries slamming people’s faces on the hoods of cars or, as in one
case in New York, taking turns sodomizing an immigrant with a billy club.
I’m unaware of any profession that has an international day of protest to draw attention to that profession’s violence– other than police. And that’s really curious when you consider the police motto is “To Protect and to Serve.” Electricians, plumbers, teachers, nurses secretaries– none of them promise to protect or to serve, and yet folks in those professions do less wanton slaughter than the people who do promise to protect and to serve.
When we consider that, do you think that the slogan printed neatly over the fender of the squad car is to distract your attention away from the barrel of the gun pointed in your face?
I’m going to go out on a limb with a wild, lunatic theory here, but do you think there’s a problem with cops and violence because cops are typically armed and electricians, plumbers, teachers, nurses, and secretaries typically are not? I think that’s definitely part of it. But not all. I suspect you could give physicists across the globe automatic weapons and the instance of physicist-shooting deaths wouldn’t increase considerably. And that’s because physicists aren’t under the grips of a powerful myth that they are serving the transcendant power of the Almighty State, and that they are the defenders of order, and that their mission is all-important.
What I mean is, police are hopped up on a powerful delusion of their own importance and the importance of law, and the importance of projecting state power through enforcement of law.
Cops don’t kill people because they have guns. They kill people because they have the delusion of “authority.”
You could arm electricians and plumbers, teachers, nurses, and secretaries, and they still wouldn’t kill even a fraction of the people that cops do.
When we look at history, it’s no wonder. There were no “police” in the U.S. until the fugitive slave laws. Modern law enforcement emerged from the volunteer slave patrols made up of Ku Klux Klanners who sought to return escaped slaves to their masters. So, from the beginning, cops were racist and brutal, and dedicated to reducing people to instruments– property, to be controlled and managed by force. Over time, this volunteer terror squad became officially incorporated into public “service.” They have always, from the start, been opposed to individual freedom, starting with apprehending the escaped slave, and they’ve always been dedicated to the institutions of property and the State, transcending all else.
The modern incarnations of those slave catchers differ from their progenitors only in wearing more-intimidating uniforms instead of pillowcases on their heads, and being more heavily armed. Their delusion of authority, then and now, fuels their terror campaign and their emnity against freedom.
Guns don’t kill people. Cops do.
Save lives. Kill cops.
This is anarchist prisoner Sean Swain from the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. If you’re listening, you ARE the resistance…
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