TEXAS, April 17 — In response to Dallas Police Department’s (DPD) racist recruiting efforts on campus, Progressive Labor Party students and neighborhood fighters demonstrated against police murders of mainly Black and Latin workers!
The DPD posted signs attempting to entice 200 students to join their racist police force. On the surface, DPD was looking for students from 18 to 24 years of age with 60-plus hours of college credits. The real reason they were specifically targeting our campus is because it’s an urban community college. In other words, they are trying to recruit working-class Black, Latin, and immigrant students, the very same students targeted by the cops. A comrade went up to one of the recruiters and asked what they were looking for, and the recruiter replied, “People from tougher neighborhoods.”
‘Whole Damn System Racist As Hell!’
In response to this racist outreach, a campus club wrote a leaflet on racist police terror and planned an action. While passing out this flyer, many students agreed that the police should not be on campus. During the demonstration, a large group of cops on bicycles circled us. Several police vans also monitored us. The kkkops eyed us continually throughout the action, trying to intimidate us. This only encouraged us to chant louder and louder! “Killer cops you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” and “Indict, convict, send those killer cops to jail, the whole damn system is racist as hell!”
Students and fighters from the neighborhood united. We held signs to voice our anger with not only the recent recruitment on campus but also the racist police murders.
The cops’ desperate attempt to recruit our youth and students in the context of the Ferguson rebellion can be seen as a fascist strategy. What better way to discipline Black and Latin youth than to recruit them into the terror machine that is the police? The DPD is the ninth largest department in the U.S. The recruiters boast that they hire 35,000 people from around the U.S. per year from as far away as Kentucky, Arizona and New York. The students’ history of fighting racism on this campus is no secret. Following the Ferguson rebellion, we demonstrated in solidarity with the anti-racist fighters.
This fight at our community college is an important one. Fighting racism strikes at the heart of capitalism. As of today, the police killed 342 people throughout the U.S. this year alone. And they dare recruit Black and Latin youth to their racist terror force. No matter the “race” of a cop, a cop is a cop: enemy of the working class.
These cops plan to come back to our campus to recruit again. We plan to challenge them with further action and our communist politics. We will win more students, professors, and campus workers to our side.