MIM Notes 211                   June 1, 2000

Clinton announces increased police plan for schools 

Using the one-year anniversary of the Columbine high school 
shootings as a backdrop, President Clinton announced $120 million 
in federal funds allegedly to deal with school violence. Half of 
this will go towards a Ju$tice Department project called "COPS in 
Schools". According to Clinton, the cops will "heighten school 
safety as well as coach sports and act as mentors and mediators 
for kids in need." The program, in its fifth round of funding, has 
already put 2,200 cops in over 1,000 communities across the u.s. 
The newest funding round will add 452 more pigs. Amerika used the 
Oklahoma City bombing to expand police state powers through the 
so-called anti-terrorism crime bill. This time, Amerika's 
INjustice system is using parents' fear that capitalist violence 
is reaching their suburban youth to extend the penetration of 
security forces into schools. In reality capitalist violence has 
always reached suburban kids. A large part of this is in the home 
in the form of patriarchal violence. But under capitalism it is 
inevitable that other forms of violence will also reach these 
youth. Giving kids contradictory messages, Amerika teaches them 
that violence is good if it's used against Third World peoples or 
anti-amerikan individuals, but bad if it's used against Amerika-
loving white people. This lesson is reinforced when the government 
sends violent cops into the schools to teach safety. This program 
could help to squelch anti-authoritarian tendencies, giving the 
pigs free access to harass and brutalize more youth. At the same 
time the cops will be working to gain the allegiance of these kids 
to the imperialist system. The use of armed police to deal with 
"kids in need" is a cruel irony in the context of summary 
executions by police of innocent oppressed nationals coast to 
coast. That these cops will somehow bring safety and security to 
the very neighborhoods and young people that ITAL they END 
terrorize daily is the height of absurdity. In reality, the 
function of the COPS program and other so-called community 
policing initiatives is to increase arrests and incarceration of 
oppressed nationals. It also helps get young people, especially 
from oppressed nations, accustomed to police occupation and a 
permanent police presence. Along with the military, the police 
will use their access to young people to recruit. For example, the 
military has begun to expand ROTC programs in high schools (and 
quite visibly in low income Latino neighborhoods in Los Angeles). 
Youth with fewer economic options or educational opportunities see 
a chance to join the police force as an opportunity, not fully 
realizing the role of this force in oppression. The COPS program 
uses the fear of violence (which in oppressed communities is a 
real fear) to further lock down oppressed nationals, extending the 
internal armed forces of the state into the public schools. No one 
should be naive enough to believe that this could reduce violence. 
This occupation is itself a form of violence. The goal of COPS is 
social control of those elements of this society that are the most 
potentially revolutionary, pure and simple. 

Note: Los Angeles Times, 16 April 2000. For theory explaining 
Amerika's increasing police craze to further national oppression, 
see MIM Theory #11: Amerikkkan Prisons on Trial ($6) and MIM 
Theory #7: Proletarian Feminist Revolutionary Nationalism on the 
Communist Road ($6).