Also see these related stories:

• Black youths rebel in Florida after cop kills driver
• Marchers storm Milwaukee City Hall
• Death-row prisoners fight for their rights
• Organizing against racism in the South
• Protest Los Angeles killer cops

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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Nov. 7, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Communities across U.S. demand

Stop racist cops

By Shelley Ettinger

It could break out anywhere, any time.

As police forces across the country conduct a racist reign of terror against oppressed communities, rage is rising, especially among young people. It's bound to explode into rebellion.

It might come in the South Bronx, N.Y., where seething tensions grip a Latino community under occupation by the racist police. In the weeks since a court acquitted the cop who killed Anthony Baez for playing touch football in the streets of his neighborhood, the anger has if anything intensified.

Maybe it will be in Milwaukee, where police just attacked African American demonstrators demanding justice at City Hall. Or the fury could rise up again in St. Petersburg, Fla., where a rebellion against killer cops shook the ruling class.

Or it could be in Detroit. Or Pittsburgh. Houston. Los Angeles.

The Nov. 5 elections will come and go. The real work of the government-carrying out the dictates of big business against the workers and the poor-stays the same.

But there is a change coming. Resistance is rising.

As wages drop and layoffs mount, as the gap between rich and poor expands, as the politicians pursue their attacks on welfare recipients and immigrants, as they move to dismantle affirmative action-the capitalist class is creating the conditions for a renewed round of struggle.

They know it. That's why their brutal, hated shock troops--the police-are running rampant, terrorizing young people of color and gunning them down. That's why they keep building prisons. They use raw repression to try to quell anger and quash action.

In so doing, they expose the inherently racist character of the capitalist state. And they push the most oppres sed toward the inevitable response: fighting back.

For the working-class and progressive movement, this is the time to build anti-racist unity. The struggle against the cops and courts is crucial to the class struggle, for they are the armed enforcers of capitalist rule.

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Copyright © 1996 workers.org