by AJAMU NANGWAYA
The Caribbean is the source of many voices of liberation — Franz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Kwame Toure, Bob Marley — but Jamaica, in particular, might do well to study the experience of the Black Panther Party, which began as an armed cop-watch program. Tivoli Gardens, where police killed 70 people in 2010, would also “be in full agreement with Franz Fanon’s articulation of the role of the police.”
“The Black Panthers made clear the need for organized collective action by way of the formation of political organizations of and by the oppressed.”
Police violence against the working-class
Amnesty International’s recently released report “Waiting in Vain: Jamaica: Unlawful police killings and relatives’ long struggle for justice” [1] [2] documents the murderous and violent behavior of the police within the island’s African working-class communities. Since the arrival of Africans in Jamaica as enslaved workers straight up to the present period of flag (in)dependence, relations between the African laboring classes and the law enforcement entities have almost always been violent, conflictual and deadly.
The behavior of the police has made it clear to the masses that the police exist to serve and protect the interests of the privileged classes. Jamaica has a population that is close to 3 million people and it has one of the highest rates of police killing of civilians in the world. In 2000, the cops killed 149 civilians. This murderous behavior peaked at 307 citizens in 2010 and dropped to 101 police-involved fatalities in 2015.[2] The marked decline in police murders has been attributed [3] to the creation of the Independent Commission of Investigations [4] (INDECOM) in 2010.
It might take students from the petite bourgeoisie or the middle-class years of exposure to critical criminology or sociology or political economy courses in university in order to grasp the true role of the police in class-based and/or racist societies. However, those of us from the ranks of Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” have PhDs in the field of race, class, gender and repressive policing from the distinguished University of Lived Experience.
“Jamaica has one of the highest rates of police killing of civilians in the world.”
The global folk philosopher and revolutionary cultural worker Bob Marley correctly reminds us that “who feels it knows it, Lord” and our experiential knowledge has taught us that our encounters with the armed guardians of the ruling-class might earn us an untimely residence in the land of the ancestors. Many of us feel and understand the frustration of dealing with widespread police violence and how it led the character in Marley’s song I Shot the Sheriff [5] [3] to put an end to the brutality and harassment of Sheriff John Brown.
Black Agenda Report for more