....“Communists are for dismantling the capitalist police, but only when the workers have taken political power and have forged experienced class-conscious combatants to replace them. This is precisely what workers have done every time they have taken power and set up their own government — from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro in Cuba, where gangsters, cops and government henchmen terrorized workers and peasants until these forces of repression were replaced by the Rebel Army and a new revolutionary police force that eliminated the vast majority of anti-social violence and other crime.”
....“One of the obvious factors in the recent rise in violent crime has been the systematic withdrawal of police in certain working-class neighborhoods, particularly those with the highest crime rates,” Nelson said. “The effect was no surprise to anyone, least of all the government officials who organized it as part of the rulers’ political responses to the broad popular demonstrations that exploded across the country following the death of Floyd, as well as the unpopular and anti-social rioting and looting. They decided to sacrifice some beat cops responsible for Floyd’s death, and to have the police pull back from many of our communities.
“Calls by some capitalist politicians to ‘defund’ or remake the police were always phony. It is the police force of the class they support, not ours, and they will pay them and use them wherever they need them. At the pickets against the Marathon Petroleum lockout in nearby St. Paul Park, the oil bosses pay local cops handsomely to act as strikebreakers. In this capacity the cops are fulfilling their primary role, a fact that is less obvious today in the absence of big union battles,” Nelson said.