"The masses must be taught to understand the true function of prisons. Why do they exist in such numbers? What is the real underlying economic motive of crime and the official definition of types of offenders or victims? We must educate the people in the real causes of economic crimes. They must be made to realize even crimes of passion are psycho-social effects of an economic order that was decadent a hundred years ago" -- George Jackson, Blood in My Eye

Police exist to uphold the status quo; the nature of the state apparatus (the police are its enforcers!) is the reconciliation of irreconcilable contradictions owing to a conflict between classes; the state apparatus is headed by the dominant class and suppresses the will of the subordinate class (the state is not an organ which sits above society but which arose from it and is alienating itself more and more from it). Which class heads the present state apparatus? Where campaign “lobbying” is a legally recognized tradition, where foreign policy is directed by corporate interests,—whether in the manner Smedley Butler describes in War is a Racket (that war is motivated by the paradoxical sale of facilitative materials for the profit of large corporations, although his solution and scale of analysis is limited), in consideration of the accompanying question of U.S. “territories” (colonies) of Guam and Puerto Rico and of integrated Hawaii which was seized in the first place for the benefit of U.S. businesses and which now has become a show place for wealthy tourists on the one hand and a platform for the suppression and empty commodification of native culture on the other, or finally in regards to the core question of imperialism, a supposedly obsolete convention really becoming more and more concentrated, that the seizure of resources and strategic positions motivated the U.S.-led wars and intervention in Afghanistan, Sudan, Libya, Chile, Nicaragua, Iraq, Somalia, Hait, etc., several of which (I am here noting Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia), can be directly traced back to a particular trust and its goals—and where the entire state machine runs (or purports to run) on the basis of a constitutional document fundamentally and explicitly favoring the creation of a civil authority working for rather than against the interests of wealth (in this vein, Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations that “civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all”), which class rules?

The police are not a force for the administration of “peace and order,” but unwitting organs employed to enforce the dominant social paradigm in the United States, which is based upon the subjugation of the proletariat and lumpenproletariat to the whim of cartels and trusts, whose aim is exploit domestic labor reserves, quell rebellion, and keep steady the flow of commodities. Everyone worships the cop/executioner who lifts murderers off of the street so that another set may take their place. The police do not exist to eliminate the underlying causes of violent crime (as well as property crime, whose motive force is more obvious), they exist to uphold the system that produces murderers while undermining disorder.