The police claim their purpose is to “serve and protect”, but every police murder is a reminder to us that it is not us who the police serve and protect.

We are told that we need police, that their actions are excusable and necessary for our protection, that without them we’d be killing each other. The truth is that we don’t need them at all. We know well enough who the killers are.

The police exist to maintain social order in the service of capitalism and the state; they’re not interested in reducing crime, but increasing social control. They are the ones firing tear gas and rubber bullets whenever a demonstration escapes their control, who attack striking workers and students.

They’re the ones who stand between every hungry person and the grocery shelves stocked with food, between every homeless person and the buildings standing empty, between immigrants and their families on the other side of the border. The police literally put people in cages. They also convince many to live in cages of their own, made out of fear.

They protect the rich, the bosses, and their property – not us.

Capitalism is a system that has been forced upon us. As long as anyone might defy the hierarchy of a ruling elite, the police are necessary to regulate, to discipline, to control. Police violence is not an accident – it’s business as usual. It cannot be separated from the larger context of increasing austerity measures, strengthening social control, new prisons, tougher laws, and omnipresent surveillance technologies. The problem is not just the violence of the police themselves, along with the courts, laws and prisons which exist to maintain the misery of capitalism.

The police can only dominate us while we remain isolated. If everyone who hates them rose up at once, they would be powerless to stop us. In the 2011 Egyptian revolt, it only took a week to burn down every police station and set every police department to flight. This is why our anger must be turned into action, such as when people rioted after the pigs murder George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The police are one of the most significant obstacles to the realization of anarchy – a situation which would require people to direct their lives according to their own initiatives, only implementing decisions they felt to be in their best interests. Conflicts would have to be resolved to the mutual satisfaction of all parties, not suppressed by a gang with a monopoly on force.