The mission of policemen in America is to "serve and protect," but if one reviews the recent history of the police force across the country, one is forced to ask: who is doing the protecting? Africans in America are far too often the victims of police violence, and very infrequently the beneficiaries of it. The police force exists as part of the distorted view of life given to us by the ruling elites. At the root of this twisted unreality is a social system based on economic and racial control. The police force itself is not an inherently evil thing, just a tool to enforce this control. Their effectiveness in maintaining this control would be far less effective if the ideologies underlying the control where not in place. These ideologies are multi-faceted; I will merely bring out a few here. The first is the ideology of blaming the victim, which is the subject of a book by the same name. Blaming the victim holds, quite innocuously it seems at first, that people ought to be held personally responsible for their actions. The logic goes: if you commit a crime, you ought to suffer the consequences. Secondly, the social order defines what "crime" is. Most often criminal behavior has little to do with absolute standards of justice and more to do with who has the money to justify and sanitize their illegal behavior. White-collar criminals engage in far more heinous behavior without getting caught than the criminals who commit muggings, theft, or drug sales. Thirdly, criminalization of certain behaviors has racial undertones-the overwhelming public perception of crime is linked with people of color, most specifically black males.
             These all have implications for the sanctioning of violence by the police force. In the first place, blaming the victim allows policemen to engage in any action that escalates the level of violence, if it can be demonstrated that such a use of force was necessary to subdue the criminal. Using...