TORY Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced another government ‘initiative’ this week, this time ordering the police to ‘crackdown on crime’.
The very idea that the police are somehow not cracking down enough will come as a shock to all those who have been on the receiving end of police brutality.
Yesterday, the BBC revealed that a disabled woman from Porthcawl in Wales had been given £40,000 in compensation after she was brutally arrested, handcuffed, left in a cell and denied medical assistance following a false allegation made by someone she had never met.
The woman, Louise Badman, said the compensation and apology from the Deputy Chief Constable for the actions of the police were meaningless if no change were to happen.
She insisted: ‘I want change and for the officers to be punished. If we attacked an officer, we would be in prison, the same thing should happen to them.’
The reality is that the police force have immunity from the state for all crimes committed, along with all the convictions secured on non-existent evidence – as in the recent case of Andrew Malkinson.
Malkinson spent 17 years in jail for a rape that he didn’t commit while all his appeals were rejected by the Crown Prosecution Service which ignored the forensic evidence proving his innocence.
In fact, police facing prison for violence against innocent members of the public is so rare that it only happens when there is no chance of a cover-up – as in the cases of Wayne Couzens, convicted for the brutal murder of Sarah Everard, and serial rapist and fellow serving police officer David Carrick.
In the wake of these convictions, it emerged that both these men had been accused on numerous occasions of violent sexual behaviour towards women.
In the case of Carrick, he was reported to the Metropolitan Police and other forces on nine separate occasions for offences including rape, domestic abuse, burglary, harassment and assault.
No charges relating to these allegations were ever brought, instead they were swept under the carpet.
No crackdown on the police has been ordered by Braverman and the Tories despite all the official inquiries that have damned them for being institutionally racist, misogynistic and corrupt.
Instead, the Tories have given them near total discretion to ban protests and demonstrations that ‘disrupt’ or threaten to disrupt the capitalist state.
This was not the first instruction issued by Braverman for the police to get onto the streets and provide the intimidation that the Tories want to exert on workers and young people.
In June, she announced that she was instructing all 43 police forces in England and Wales to ‘ramp up’ the use of stop-and-search powers in a blatant attempt to enforce a reign of fear in the hope of terrorising workers and youth into passively accepting they have no future under capitalism except poverty.
While Braverman is demanding more police on the streets in a public display of the authority of the capitalist state, the real criminals are to be found in the ranks of the bosses and bankers, and the job of the police is to protect them from an enraged working class and youth.
The huge companies have exploited the pandemic and the imperialist war in the Ukraine to drive up their profits, protect dividends to shareholders and make multi-million pay rises and bonuses to their bosses while workers struggle to feed their families.
In its acute crisis and economic collapse the Tories are turning to the police to enforce the rule of the capitalist class through imposing a police state where workers are forced to accept a future of poverty as the price to keep bankrupt British capitalism from collapse.
The powerful working class will never accept having its rights destroyed to keep the bankers and bosses in profit. The time has come to use this strength by forcing the TUC to call a general strike to kick out the Tories and bring in a workers’ government.
A workers’ government will disband the police and replace the capitalist state with a workers’ state and socialism.
Join the WRP lobby of the TUC on 11th September to demand a general strike now.
