Washington D.C. retains title:
Murder capital of the world
Washington, D.C., the U.$. capital city and the city with the greatest number of police officers per capita in the country, has had the highest (illegal) murder rate of any large city over the past 10 years. Police-state zealots conclude from this that D.C., like other cities, needs more and more pigs policing the streets. Revolutionaries know increased numbers of police are not the answer to crime. In fact, the proliferation of Amerikkka's police force only increases the violence which is committed against the masses.
Amerikkka is at war with its internal semi-colonies. Amerikkka systematically denies oppressed nations the right to self-determination and control over political, economic and military affairs. The Amerikkkan police state enforces the oppressive relationship between the white nation and internal semi-colonies through its illegitimate INjustice system. Amerikkkan domination depends on its ability to control the oppressed through massive round ups by the Amerikkkan pigs into the ever-increasing prison system.
The high number of illegal murders mostly result from current systematic poverty and inequality. And it is the occupying settler police army which enforces national oppression. Above all, more pigs does not mean that the causes for crime are eradicated. Increasing the number of agents of Amerikka's police state will only strengthen Amerikkka's war against oppressed nations.
The total number of illegal murders fell in D.C. last year, but the rate per capita was more than five-times as high as New York City's. There are still many more murders each year than there were in the early 1980s. According to a government study, a Black man in D.C. who turned 18 in 1989 had a 1 in 24 chance of being murdered by 1995 -- the worst odds in the country. All that is despite the fact that, with seven cops on duty for every 1,000 residents, D.C. is the most heavily policed city in the country. Obviously the police are not helping to prevent illegal murders, so the push for more can only be taken as a push to increase oppression of the masses, not solution of society's problems.
D.C. is also one of the most imprisoned cites in the country. According to a study by the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, in 1997 50% of Black men in D.C. ages 18-35 were in prison or jail, probation or parole, out on bond or being sought on a warrant. That number was increased from 42% in 1992. This mass persecution by the INjustice system is a vast crime of national oppression perpetrated in the name of the law and democracy. Notably, the vast majority of murders that are not being prevented by this police state are committed against young Black men.
MIM refers to "illegal murders" in this case because the biggest murderers -- the imperialists, their corporations and their armies -- aren't doing anything illegal by bourgeois standards, and their crimes go unreported in official crime statistics.
Washington, D.C. is the murder capital of the world in more ways than one. Besides the illegal murder rates, D.C. is the seat of power for the most murderous imperialist power in the world: the United Snakes of Imperialism. Amerika's armies killed more than a million Vietnamese, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and unknown numbers of murdered and disappeared activists and revolutionaries throughout Latin America. Beside direct military invasion, Amerikkka continues its long history of propping up puppet comprador regimes, as in Peru and the Philippines, which carry out systematic torture and war against the masses.
This is also the police state that murderously crushed the Maoist revolutionary Black Panther Party of the late 1960s, whose plan for self-reliance and self-determination for the Black nation would have blocked the importation of heroine and cocaine, and countered economic isolation of the urban lumpenproletariat, all of which fuel today's illegal murder rate.
Just as all nations oppressed by imperialism throughout the world, oppressed nations within the illegitimate U.$. borders need self determination and national liberation. These are the products of revolutionary struggle, not a stronger occupying army of police.
Notes: Murder and police statistics from Washington Post, 19 April 1998, p. A1. Prison statistics from "Hobbling a Generation: Young African American Men in D.C.'s Criminal Justice System Five years Later," National Center for Institutions and Alternatives. http://www.igc.org/ncia/hobb.html
