So Johannes Mehserle was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Really though, i could care less. The world would be a much better place without any cops, but it would also be a much better place without any prisons. I'm a prison abolitionist, and this means that i dont think anyone should be sent to our modern prisons. they just shouldnt exist; not for rapists, not for child molesters, not for cops.
what alternatives do i offer? that would depend of what kind of society i was living in. so i'm kind of refusing to answer that question, because it is a theoretical one. i'm not saying we need to get rid of prisons, but keep everything else the same. im saying we need to get rid of the whole capitalist system. we need to abolish prisons along with a whole hell of a lot of other crap.
but i have seen first hand how certain anarchists physically deal with rapists in their communities. that's certainly one way of doing it.
I'm not going to shed any tears for mehserle, but i certainly am not going to go and demand he get convicted of murder. i have no interest in demanding anything of the "justice" system other than it leave me and my friends the hell alone. or better yet, that it disappear all together.
it always makes me sad when i hear people saying things like "justice has been served" when someone gets a high prison sentence. i just dont understand how revenge is equated to justice. they are two separate things, and a lot of the time revenge isnt useful to anyone.
i suppose an argument can be made that because a cop was convicted of something it might restrain other cops from killing other people. but i doubt it. the pigs know they are exempt from the law.
all that being said, rioting is an appropriate response. not to the verdict or the fact that the legal system is unjust, but because yet another unarmed black man was shot in the back by a pig. in fact, people should be rioting every single day because it is every single day that pigs harass, intimidate, beat up and kill people around the world. we should be rioting every day until this whole authoritarian and oppressive system is destroyed.
and finally then we can decide what we want to do about the rapists, the child molesters and the pigs.
crimethinc has a new poster out called The Police. it reads:
The ones who beat Rodney King, who gunned down Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo and Oscar Grant, who murdered Fred Hampton in his bed. The ones who broke Víctor Jara’s hands and Steve Biko’s skull, who disappeared dissidents from Argentina to Zaire, who served Josef Stalin. The ones who enforced Apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the United States. The ones who interrogated Black Panthers and Catholic Workers, who maintained records on 16 million people in East Germany, who track us through surveillance cameras and phone taps. The ones firing tear gas and rubber bullets whenever a demonstration gets out of hand, who back the bosses in every strike. The ones who stand between every hungry person and the grocery shelves stocked with food, between every homeless person and the buildings standing empty, between every immigrant and her family.
In every nation, in every age, you tell us you’re indispensable, that without you we’d all be killing each other. But we know well enough who the killers are. You won’t fuck with us much longer.
oh, and i guess the news media was correct about outside aggitators coming in to oakland to cause trouble. 14 of them were from concord!
off the pigs. abolish the prisons. riot until the system we live under is destroyed.
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