The Lynching of Dexter Reed Jr.: Police Violence in America
Dexter Reed Jr. and his loved ones celebrating his graduation.
On March 21, 2024, Chicago tactical police, in plain clothes, shot and killed Dexter Reed Jr., a young Black man, during a traffic stop. The officers who pulled Reed over were not trained for typical encounters with civilians. Video footage does not demonstrate the plain clothes officers following procedure, such as explaining why Reed was pulled over, and instead choosing to surround his car and bark orders. When Reed did not behave exactly as instructed, despite telling the officers he was trying to follow their commands, the officers pointed their guns at him.
The video footage shows Reed initially firing from his car at the officers, who dressed as civilians and did not identify themselves as police. Following this, four officers shot at him a total 96 times in 41 seconds. While taking heavy fire, Reed exited his vehicle and was shot down. Reed’s attorney noted he was unarmed as he was fatally shot at while exiting his vehicle. While Reed lay motionless on the ground, an officer shot him three more times before they handcuffed him. The police oversight body already has an open investigation on the same squad for a similar stop, also purportedly resulting from a seat belt violation.
In 2022, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered tactical officers, such as the ones who shot Reed, to patrol the streets in beat cars and respond to 911 calls. This order served as a sort of “punishment” of specialized cops for not making enough arrests. These officers were trained to conduct surveillance and respond to gunfire, not to de-escalate or treat civilians with respect.
The state tolerates—and even encourages—police violence because such violence maintains the class power of the capitalists and the smooth running of capitalist exploitation. As Marx and Lenin continuously demonstrate throughout their work, the system of capitalism alienates workers from the product of their work. This creates an irreconcilable class antagonism between the people who work for a living and those who own capital and profit off of workers, like capitalists and landlords. The bourgeois so-called “democratic” state reserves the right to use violence against its own citizens to fulfill this purpose.
The role of the police is to protect, by force, the property, and thus, the supremacy of the capitalist class from the workers and the poor. This supremacy is inextricably linked presently and historically with the supremacy of white people over Black people and other racialized minorities. The modern police force draws its lineage from the ‘slave patrols’ in the 1700s and currently operates in ways linked with America’s racist attitudes. Black people are 95% more likely to be pulled over for a traffic stop due to the over-policing of predominantly Black neighborhoods. Black people are 115% more likely to be searched than white people during a traffic stop even though white people are more likely to be carrying contraband.
These conditions lead to a double oppression which burdens the Black proletariat: they are oppressed as workers and as a racial minority. This, in addition to the rampant racism so common among police, leads to disproportionate police violence inflicted upon Black people. It is not that there are some “bad cops” who need to be removed from the force, but that the position of the police is one pitted against the broad masses of working and oppressed people. The only “good cop” is a cop no more.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle attempt to obscure this reality, and instead, cultivate the fantasy that there is no class struggle and that the police exist to protect us. This picture of bourgeois society without class antagonisms is followed with justification and support for increasing police budgets and building more cop cities to keep us “safe.”
Police, in fact, do not protect us. The Supreme Court has upheld that police do not have a duty to save lives, and we see this over and over again. They do, on the other hand, protect themselves by lying and covering up instances of police brutality. The police substitute solidarity with the masses for the Fraternal Order of Police. They are, without a doubt, class traitors: the guard dogs of white supremacy and the bourgeoisie.
We should remember George Floyd, murdered in 2020 by three Minneapolis officers who knelt on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes until he was suffocated to death despite Floyd pleading 20 times that he could not breathe; Breonna Taylor, shot and killed in Louisville when police broke into the wrong apartment attempting a no-knock raid at around 4 a.m.; Laquan MacDonald, a Black teenager whose murderer, a Chicago police officer, was let out of prison after serving only three years for shooting MacDonald—who was lying prone as ordered—16 times over the span of 13 seconds and with multiple clips of ammunition; Ryan Gainer, an autistic teenage boy “armed” with a gardening tool who was shot and killed by police who were called to the scene to help him; “Tortuguita” Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a climate activist who was executed–seated with hands raised–by Georgia state troopers who walked free after firing 57 shots into Tortuguita; Timothy Thomas, an unarmed Black teenager whose murder at the hands of Cincinnati police in Over-the-Rhine deservedly sparked unrest in 2001. We also need to remember the murder of Chicago Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton at the hands of the state, the beating of Rodney King, the 1985 aerial bombing of civilian neighborhoods targeting Black MOVE activists in Philadelphia and the police brutality that sparked the Arab Spring and the Stonewall Riots of 1969. These and all other real-world interactions between cops and civilians should inform our politics, not liberal fantasies of the benevolence of the “democratic” state. There is not a state more undemocratic than one which murders civilians without consequence.
The United States has over 2.3 million people in prison, all violently arrested and thrown in jail. This amounts to the richest nation on Earth holding one quarter of all prisoners worldwide, despite being home to 5% of the world’s population. Once arrested, it can take years to even have the chance to plead your case in front of a jury of your peers, especially if you are poor. It is damning, but hardly surprising, that 95% of all convictions are plea bargains, often due to threats from prosecutors and the abuse faced while awaiting a trial. Data suggest that over one-fifth of people who plead guilty are innocent. It is only in ideology and fantasy, not reality, that we in “democratic” and “developed” countries have the right to a free and nonviolent life.
The measures that would keep communities safe and deter crime are measures that cannot be fully realized in a bourgeois society: investing in uplifting people from poverty and providing access to high quality food, housing, healthcare, education and rehabilitation. None of this serves the interests of capitalists, who want a workforce desperate to labor for any wage. Instead, tax dollars are invested into police budgets to incarcerate the poor, supplying the system with prison labor which costs next to nothing. The legacy of forced labor lives on through the US prison system.
Only socialism—the abolition of capitalism and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie—can end the exploitation of the poor and working masses, the double oppression of the Black and Brown proletariat and the never ending assault on the people by the police. With socialism comes the abolition of the police, and without it, abolition can not be realized. This does not mean we should abandon the slogan “abolish the police.” Instead, we should rally around it, bring increasing numbers of the masses into the struggle against racism and the police, and extend the struggle into the broader struggle for the liberation of all poor and oppressed peoples.
As the story of this police execution is told, we should not let the bourgeois media shape Dexter Reed’s legacy. The predictable reaction to Reed’s death will be to blame him for shooting at the police. Yet, to place blame solely on Reed would be to completely ignore the unnecessary escalation of the officers who pulled him over as well as the context of racialized killings committed by our racist police force. To sell us a police state, politicians need to make us feel that the police make us safe; we should instead honor Reed’s memory by fighting collectively against this notion and against the bourgeois police state itself.