By COOPER BARD
Cherelle Parker was sworn in on Jan. 2 as the 100th mayor of Philadelphia. She will be the first woman to take the office in the city’s 340-year history.
While the new mayor has talked about the need for better schools, ending poverty, and forging tighter relations with the community, she is a machine politician with ties to the wealthy establishment. Foremost on her platform is the pledge to increase the number of police officers, under the guise of “public safety” and curbing gun violence. She will also give police the power to perform “stop-and-frisk” actions. This is a practice that can be used at an officer’s discretion and is deployed disproportionately against working-class Black people, Latinos, and immigrants.
So, from the early days of her new administration, Philadelphia will learn that a Black woman from an underprivileged background can gain office, but that she nevertheless will uphold institutions that re-enforce poverty and practices that reinforce white racism.
The lesson should be clear: It is the institutions of capitalist society that are the problem, and the people in office will be bent to their needs. Career politicians are not a product simply of their class and racial background but are also shaped during the course of their political careers, molded to serve the interests of a capitalist, racist, and repressive system.
“Terry stops” are “stop-and-frisk”
“Stop-and-frisk” is a term that has been used to describe the police practice of stopping civilians either on the street or in their personal vehicles if the police deem them to be “reasonably suspect” of crimes. The reality of the practice is that police have used it to stop certain ethnic groups, particularly Black people, more than any other group. It is no secret that stops and searches of civilian vehicles have often ended fatally, since police officers are given discretion to use lethal violence, and are in practice above the law. Stop-and-frisk is a practice that objectively endangers Black and immigrant communities.
Parker spoke approvingly of stop-and-frisk early during her electoral campaign, but has since modified her language to be more commensurate with her moderately social-reformist image.
Last May, the mayoral candidate euphemistically referred to the re-introduction of stop-and-frisk in the following manner: “Terry stops are what I wholeheartedly embrace as a tool that law enforcement needs, to make the public safety of our city their number one priority. It is a legal tool.” This was referring to a 1968 Supreme Court case, Terry v. Ohio, that ruled that police could stop and search someone with “reasonable suspicion,” at the officers’ discretion. However, in a political landscape changed by the Black Lives Matter movement, it should be hard to take seriously the notion that police can properly police themselves.
Beyond mere wordage, Parker also plans on adding 300 cops to Philadelphia’s police force. This, combined with allowance for stop-and-frisk, is a very real decrease in public safety, and an increase of the potential for police violence against marginalized communities. According to data collected by WHYY, there is no demonstrated correlation between gun violence and the number of stops performed by police. Stop-and-frisk is not a solution, no matter what we call it.
Democratic Party policy
This addition to policing was placed first on Parker’s list of things to be accomplished in the 100-day action plan. It signals a priority in-line with the rest of Parker’s party, such as President Biden’s adding billions of dollars to police budgets. In Atlanta, the majority Democratic Party administration fully supports the Cop City project, despite the mass rejection of the facility by Black and working-class Atlanta residents.
Neither the Democratic nor Republican parties have viable solutions to the many crises facing the system, such as climate change, decreasing real wages, increasing health-care costs, and ongoing wars. They must continue to serve the wealthy interests of industrial, financial, and military capitalism. In lieu of real solutions that would benefit the majority of the planets people, the political duopoly can only offer repression in the form of increased policing and prisons, as well as funding to repressive and murderous regimes allied with U.S. imperialist policy.
Repressive institutions and minority representation
History shows that electing Blacks or women to office alone has not advanced the interests of working-class Black people, or the special oppression of women. In some ways, it’s caused disorientation. This is because, while representation has been a historic problem, the very institutions themselves reproduce and exacerbate oppression, poverty, and climactic destruction. In the case of Philadelphia, it was the first Black mayor, Wilson Goode, who in 1985 signed off on the MOVE bombing, a police assault in West Philly that killed 11 people, including five kids.
From openly racist mayors like Frank Rizzo, to Goode’s green-lighting of police terror-bombing, Philadelphia as a long history of administrations that tolerate violent policing and racial inequities. Philadelphia police are notorious for their corruption and for disproportionately targeting working-class and BIPOC communities. This is the institution that Parker has joined, in the founding city of the most powerful capitalist nation in history, with powerful industrial and land-owning classes who maintain police and prisons for their own benefit and against the interests of millions of working-class and Black people.
While campaigning for mayor, Parker stressed her underprivileged background, and during the November 2023 victory party, she said, “… I wouldn’t allow any anybody else to attempt to weaponize my humble beginnings against me. So before they could do it, I made sure that I told you that I was born to a single teenage mother that I was raised by my grandparents, that my grandmother collected welfare and subsidized food to take care of me.”
Since these humble beginnings, however, she became a career politician in a capitalist system built by super-exploited Black and immigrant labor, which reinforces white racism by legal and extra-legal means. She is also a member of the pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist Democratic Party, identifying with the “moderate” policies of the party’s local machine.
What is the solution to gun violence?
The solution to gun violence was never policing and prisons! These institutions demonstrably increase violence against minorities and oppress the poor and working class.
In the United States, police routinely kill over 1000 working-class people every year, who are disproportionately Black and Latino. Police are rarely punished for killing, domestic abuse, planting false evidence, bribery, or other misdeeds. In all American cities they are given free reign to enforce the law as they see fit, and are increasingly militarized. The police are fundamentally a tool of repression, to re-enforce capitalist control over working people, and to prop up an inherently unjust government. From month to month, they act like an occupying force in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Moreover, the for-profit prison industry has a stake in preserving underemployment, poverty, and therefore chronic criminality, in order to ensure continued government funding as well as to provide a cheap labor force that they can pay mere cents an hour. They are capitalists, interested in profits alone.
The real source of gun violence in Philadelphia lies in the fact that a layer of the population is consistently underemployed, given poor housing and schools, and has no alternative outlet for their despair. Mayor Parker has also highlighted these problems and claims to want to solve them. Of course, it is fine to talk about these things, but action is what counts. While the schools, health care, housing, parks, and public transportation are shortchanged, the city continues to give perks to wealthy interests in the form of tax breaks and lax regulations and building codes. And similarly, the state and federal governments extend lavish subsidies to Big Oil and military-supply industries, while projects for working-class communities and the public welfare go begging.
The landlords, banks, property developers, and other capitalists will try to squeeze this city for every possible cent. The enrichment of this tiny minority comes at the expense of the population. This is the real source of the violence. Parker and the Democratic Party have no intention of opposing these wealthy interests. Workers need to build their own political party capable of addressing the problems that the capitalist class refuses to solve. Only a government led by the working class can enact these solutions.
Photo: Cherelle Parker (Yong Kim / Philadelphia Inquirer