NYPD: Mass Shooters
It's time for another reckoning with police
Multiple NYPD cops shot at a man named Derell Mickles after he evaded the subway fare Sunday afternoon. They followed him at length for skipping out on $2.90, followed him onto the train, and eventually drew their weapons and repeatedly fired at Derell, injuring him along with one of their fellow officers and two other people. Video shows a bloodied man lying on the floor of a subway car with his hands handcuffed behind his back. One of the bystanders hit by the NYPD was struck in the head and is listed as being in critical condition.
This is a mass shooting, both by definition and in that it takes no imagination to conjure up the panic and extreme terror felt by each and every person present when the NYPD recklessly opened fire in the subway on a quiet Sunday afternoon. The blatant disregard for human life displayed by escalating a situation and shooting a Black man over $2.90 is already horrendous enough, but the further willingness to risk ending multiple lives by firing so wildly that they struck three bystanders, including one of their own, is appalling.
We are once again thrust into a moment where the police and their unwavering supporters will claim that this horrific shooting was just a few bad apples – regardless of how absurd “a few bad apples shot up the subway” sounds. But the truth is that this is what a culture of total immunity does. The NYPD, like so many other police departments, close ranks around murderous cops every single time they kill and harm people. They close ranks no matter what the crime is. Recent reporting from ProPublica shows that the NYPD is simply tossing out hundreds of misconduct cases without even looking at them. Such a culture of impunity among armed officers with a long history of violence and corruption leads to moments like this, a reckless mass shooting that could have easily been even worse.
This shooting comes at the same time that top NYPD brass, and other city officials, are being raided by federal agents. NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban resigned just days ago after it came to light that federal authorities had raided his home and seized his phone in a sprawling anti-corruption case. Rather than taking any sort of accountability for the widespread corruption in his department, which appears to include shakedowns of local establishments, Caban wrote in his resignation letter that the raid on his home and the accompanying investigation had "created a distraction for our department." This, again, is no fluke. The commissioner is not just one bad apple. He was the head apple, for one, but he also represents a culture of impunity and corruption that is endemic to the department and to policing — it’s not isolated to New York or to a few officers.
A culture of impunity, recklessness, and lawlessness pervades the entirety of policing. And the reasons for that are two-fold. The first is that police do not actually exist to protect us, to protect people. I mean that very literally. A 2005 Supreme Court ruling, Castle Rock v. Gonzales, holds that police do not have a constitutional duty to protect people from harm. Maybe even more importantly, police don’t act as if they have a duty to protect us. When people try to stay in their homes and resist evictions, or protest for the right to housing, cops side with landlords. When people demand climate solutions, police arrest us and side with fossil fuel corporations. When people protest police murders, police side with the police murderers. None of this is new, but internalizing that this is who cops are, that this is what policing as an institution is, is crucially important.
The second reason that police lawlessness is worse than ever is that cops have become a more overtly fascist force. While there has always been recklessness and disregard for the law, especially when it comes to terrorizing Black and brown communities and policing poor communities, ‘law enforcement’ unions have increasingly taken to endorsing Trump, cozying up to Proud Boys and their ilk, and filling their ranks with far-right militia members and people with fascist views. So now both the structure purpose, and the rank of police forces are all aligned in a far-right orientation that doesn’t care for the law and places their own pursuit of power and wealth and an extreme political ideology above the people they occasionally pretend to serve.
If we continue to misunderstand who police are and what policing is — if we continue to think a mass shooting by cops or a federal corruption probe into top officers is the result of some bad apples instead of a rotten system — we’ll keep making the same mistakes and the violence of policing will continue. Minor reforms can’t fix a purpose that has been baked in since the inception of an institution. We can’t tweak and workshop around the fact that policing is meant to protect capital, capitalism, white supremacy, and oppressive forces of all kinds. These NYPD cops didn’t shoot Derell Mickles because he was a threat, they didn’t even really shoot him over $2.90. They shot him, and three other people, to enforce the status quo, to enforce a system that comprehensively degrades and devalues human life.
Police are the tip of the spear. They are the sharp edge of capitalism’s decree that you must comply, you must allow yourself to be subjugated to the unfair rules of the system. Violating that compact makes you fair game to policing, and fair game to being crushed and ground up. This is what we should not abide, should not permit to continue. We have to declare that cops shooting up a subway is not permissible, not something we will tolerate. Four short years ago people across the world rose up to say that police murders would not stand. And the ruling class responded by doubling down on policing, funding cops, and cop cities. They were able to do so because we had not built the power to force them to do otherwise.
Since 2020, and for decades prior, countless people have devoted themselves to creating the collective power to build a better world where police don’t do mass shootings and where lacking $2.90 is never a death sentence. And yet we need still more people. We need still more organizing. We need to create a world where life is valued and precious, and where the forces of the state aren’t able to deal death without consequence. Let us move towards a world without police. That is a step towards real freedom, a step towards a world where the sharp spear of capitalism and white supremacy isn’t held at our necks. Let us organize and move step by step towards real freedom, real justice, and real liberation.
P.S. If you’re in New York and want to organize against NYPD violence and the endless expansion of their power, people are organizing against the Cop City that the police hope to create in Queens. You can learn more about it and plug into organizing efforts against it here: https://actionnetwork.org/events/stop-cop-city-nyc-september
Whenever I hear the "bad apple" argument, I am reminded of Billie Holiday's song Strange Fruit—"blood on the leaves and blood at the root." Though this song is a metaphor for lynching, which the police have historically been complicit in, it reminds me that bad apples only grow from bad roots. If bad apples are being produced, we must question the seed and the roots they come from. Sadly, the argument never focuses on the root and is reduced to the victim should of stopped and listened.
Recently I was in a small town near the Poconos in PA. Long story short I am a white female senior citizen. I parked in a lot that was supervised because the town was hosting a huge event. I parked and spent 3 hours in the town and when I returned to my car I noticed the meters where people were paying. I asked the attendant if I needed to pay to exit the lot. He said “did you pay when you came in” and I answered no. He shrugged and said don’t worry about it. It was a $20 fee!
I guess the point of all of this is simply…how would they have treated a young black person, male Or female, had they neglected to pay. My privilege astounds me at the same time that my heart breaks at the inhumanity inflicted on someone who lacks $2.90. Fuck the police….