In the wake of a new wave of police killings that involved Black people suffering from mental health crises, the BLM movement needs to draw important lessons about the limits of police “reforms.”
The following statement was released by Detroit Will Breathe, an organization that was formed during the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The group emerged out of democratic assemblies held before the start of the daily marches taking place in Detroit. In this statement, Detroit Will Breathe seeks to draw some initial conclusions from the experience of the movement, take up the nature of police brutality and the system that produces it, and argues that the BLM movement needs to take up the fight for socialism to end police brutality and the racist, capitalist system that produces it.
This summer, the American Midwest has been the epicenter of several notable police murders of Black people including John Zook, Jr. of Wayne, Mich., Sonya Massey of Springfield, Ill., Sherman Butler of Detroit, and Samuel Sharpe of Milwaukee. While most of these tragedies occurred many miles from one another, they all share common threads in that the victims were poor, Black, and suffering from some version of a mental health crisis at the time of their deaths.
Samuel Sharpe, a veteran and well-known resident of an unhoused community in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Milwaukee, was gunned down without hesitation, just blocks from the Republican National Convention (RNC), as he turned to run away from police after being approached by officers in the midst of an argument with a neighbor. One of the officers was from Columbus, Ohio, and was part of a contingent of over 4,000 cops from over 60 different police departments within and out of state brought to Milwaukee as an occupation force to provide security
In Detroit, while Sherman Butler was being evicted from his apartment, he was tased by a Detroit Police Department officer, then shot and killed by a court bailiff before a police mental health response unit could arrive, rendering the purpose of the response team useless. This occurred in one of America’s “most stressed cities,” which also happens to be the nation’s Blackest and poorest major city, and has faced waves of gentrification, mass evictions, and resident displacement.
Sonya Massey and John Zook, Jr. took the initiative of contacting the police for help and ended up shot to death as a result. In the case of John Zook, Jr., officers knew the man and were aware of his chronic and acute mental health conditions before responding to the call. Yet, despite John’s attempts to help himself, it wasn’t enough to protect him from being tased and killed by the very people whom he relied on for assistance. Sonya Massey met the same fate. As witnessed in the horrifying body cam footage showing her crouched down to protect herself, with both hands in the air, unarmed, Sonya uttered her last words, “I’m sorry,” just before an officer took her life.
We know all too well that in poor and working-class communities, police often resort to brute and deadly force as an immediate response to their encounters with their victims. The attitudes and actions of these officers are not anomalies and express a profound lack of humanity, revealing how Black lives still don’t seem to matter. The mental health and housing crises endured by Johnny, Samuel, Sherman, and Sonya, along with the lack of available resources that could have helped them, are directly connected to the exploitative conditions created by capitalism and the overfunded police departments that killed them.
Since the 1970s, public funding for essential departments and social programs–such as education, housing, and mental health–have been consistently slashed or privatized. The decades-long dismantling of infrastructure and institutions meant to address social needs are in contrast to the ever-increasing police budgets (including for the War on Drugs, militarizing our borders, and building cop cities) and perpetuating endless war and suffering across the world (such as funding genocide in Gaza). Governments maintain the illusion that resources for our communities are too scarce, while budgets for cops and wars balloon. The combination of defunded social programs and hyper-policing has contributed to the destabilization of communities and furthers a false narrative about the “need” for even more police and incarceration as a means to solving issues related to poverty and disparity.
In the wake of the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020, millions took to the streets in the largest protest against the police in U.S. history, which brought forth an array of demands to transform the status quo. Although liberal cities commissioned murals of victims and Democrats ran their 2020 electoral campaigns on the coattails of the Black Lives Matter movement, those demands for change were largely ignored. Some places instituted toothless reforms such as body cams or chokehold bans, but these have failed to stop people being killed by police chokeholds and video evidence has not proven sufficient to convict killer cops. A few efforts to “defund” departments were attempted — and shortly after rescinded. In some high-profile cases, the State has been willing to fire or prosecute individual officers quickly*. However, none of these reforms or concessions address the system as a whole.
*As this statement was being written, all charges against two police officers who participated in the murder of Breonna Taylor have been dropped — with the courts blaming Breonna’s partner for her death.
Since the murder of Michael Brown and the Ferguson uprising, police killings reached a decade high in 2023, with 2024 on track to surpass that. Meanwhile, the State uses repression to crush our uprisings and maneuvers to co-opt our movements to quell the organic rage expressed by the community. Using the tools of capital and an individualistic approach to identity politics (without class analysis), corporations, the nonprofit industrial complex, and the Democratic Party funnel energy from the streets and launder it into bureaucratic channels such as voting campaigns and DEI initiatives that never threaten policing or the system it defends. Nothing materially changes. Since its origins in slave patrols, indigenous removal, and suppression of workers, the police continue fulfilling their role: to protect property, capital, and the interests of its owners.
In America and around the globe, capitalism produces savage inequalities, racism, and intersecting public health crises on a mass scale, resulting in the oppression, criminalization, and death of Black, Brown, and working-class people. This same oppression also creates hyper-exploitation of large sectors of workers, through precarious employment and unlivable wages. The hyper-exploitation of Black and Brown people helps keep wages pushed down and fuels worsening living conditions (including mental health) for the entire working class, while also serving as a tool for capitalists to maintain power by keeping the people divided and disoriented. A racist economic system enforced by a racist system of over-policing ensures the existence of intersecting crises, and that people will suffer and die simply for not having adequate access to employment or resources such as healthcare and secure housing.
The worsening conditions within our communities are often ignored and even scapegoated onto other oppressed peoples within the working class, and rarely addressed with more than idle promises from both the Democrats and Republicans, political parties that serve the same ruling class of capitalists. Instead of fundamental change, we get thoughts and prayers and are told to tighten our belts. This is the same old story repeating itself through new decades. In the spirit of Black August, as we reflect on Michael, George, Breonna, Johnny, Samuel, Sherman, Sonya, and so many others, with each passing generation it becomes clearer that the economic, political, and policing systems in the United States are beyond reform.
Whether advocating for defunding, community control, or the abolition of policing altogether, imagining a new model of public safety cannot be achieved without a fundamental transformation of society away from an economic system that prioritizes profits and property over people, and towards a system that seeks to meet the basic needs of everyone and dignity for all. That transformation will not happen through political parties that are fully invested in maintaining the foundation of capitalism, which inevitably evolves into fascism at home and imperialism abroad. The change we need will only come through the mass self-organization and mobilization of the working class in the streets, workplaces, and classrooms, independent of the political structures of the capitalist ruling class.
While we continue to fight our local and regional campaigns to demand justice, we must also express solidarity with one another by identifying the ways in which our oppression intersects and parallels. We must open space for political perspectives and organizing strategies that orient our movements to struggle for a common goal of abolishing a system that exploits and oppresses us and a world democratically controlled by workers and the oppressed. We must fight for socialism.
Detroit Will Breathe, in solidarity with the Detroit Tenants Association and General Strike Detroit/Downriver, condemn the killings and demands the release of all body cam footage, the firing and prosecution of all officers involved in the murders of John, Samuel, Sherman, and Sonya, universal healthcare for all, and declares that housing is a human right!