Communists have long explained the true purpose of police is not to “protect and serve” all citizens equally, but to defend the ruling class and its private property. Their fundamental duty to the capitalist system animates the racist modus operandi of so many police departments—the daily killing of workers and poor people, especially those who are Black or Latino.

Shot dead celebrating his birthday

Los Angeles has been rocked by yet another police terror outrage. On July 13, Bay Area native Ricardo Javier Ramirez, Jr. was on vacation in South Central LA with friends, celebrating his 18th birthday and recent high school graduation. The trip should have marked the beginning of a new chapter in Ramirez’s young life—not its end. But after an altercation with a plainclothes LAPD officer who was tailing Ramirez in an unmarked car, the unarmed teen was shot dead.

This appalling tragedy is not unique. According to the Mapping Police Violence project, 1,247 people were killed by police in 2023. In 59% of killings, the victim had not threatened anyone with a weapon. Ramirez’s family is demanding justice, but the odds are stacked against them in the capitalist courts; there have only been ten convictions for last year’s police shootings.

All of this comes just four years after the historic George Floyd uprising in the summer of 2020, when tens of millions of workers and youth—from all racial backgrounds and in virtually every populated area in the country—took to the streets against police violence. Los Angeles was an important epicenter that summer, witnessing multiple demonstrations hundreds of thousands strong. But with no revolutionary party to guide the struggle, many grew demoralized and returned home after weeks of stormy mobilization and further police repression.

All of this comes just four years after the historic George Floyd uprising, when tens of millions of workers and youth took to the streets against police violence. / Image: Lorie Shaull, Flickr

Liberals complicit

The Democratic Party, fully complicit in this state of affairs through their stewarding of most major cities’ police departments and local governments, swooped in to redirect the mass unrest into safe electoral channels. Far from “defunding the police,” Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have lavished local and state police with billions in federal funds since being elected.

Liberals often call for more diverse “representation” in police departments. But Ramirez died at the hands of a Black police sergeant. The racism in policing is deeper, uglier, and more complicated than the identity politics evangelists care to admit. The truth is, as Malcolm X explained: “You can’t have capitalism without racism.” Police exist to maintain capitalism and will be inherently discriminatory, no matter the skin color of any particular cop.

Avenge Ricardo Ramirez through class struggle

Ramirez and all other victims of police terror will not be forgotten. Revulsion at police violence will be fuel for the fire of future mass uprisings. It’s only a matter of time before millions are in the streets again, fighting back on a scale even greater than in 2020. But this movement can only succeed in eradicating racism by overthrowing the whole rotten capitalist system.

History has furnished numerous proofs of Lenin’s dictum that the working class requires a most disciplined and resolute Marxist party—painstakingly assembled in advance of a revolutionary uprising—to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a workers’ government. The task of building a mass communist party with a presence in every workplace, campus, and neighborhood falls to the communist generation, who have taken up the call to avenge Ricardo Ramirez and chuck racist police into the dustbin of history.