Cops at Cranbrook

Police representatives from twelve suburban communities have been training in methods of riot control on the Cranbrook School campus once a month throughout the year.

The newly-formed Cranbrook SDS concentrated on their removal as a primary goal. A victory was scored May 8, when the pigs failed to appear, apparently aware of the increasing militancy of certain students at Cranbrook School. This eliminated the necessity of an open confrontation between SDS and the cops, as this was the date when such a confrontation was supposed to have occurred.

The Cranbrook SDS sincerely hopes that subsequent injustices may he handled with similar non-violent methods and that all groups throughout the world can put down the mindless enforcers of the oppressive statutes, laws and ordinances, and arbitrary whims of the school-military-industrial complex with equal physical pacifism. However, the aims of the revolution must and will be accomplished by any means necessary.

It has been stated through members of the official hierarchy of both the local governments and the city of Detroit that the police are training for riot suppression in an attempt to maintain law and order.

However, this law and order is a concept created for the maintenance of the status quo and the present class structure of upper, middle, and oppressed classes.

The police are training, not for riot suppression, but for aggression against all those who dare challenge the upper class’ “right” to run things. By serving the rich property owners, the police automatically become the enemy of the slum dwellers who have no property. By serving in a swinish manner, they become pigs.

It is clear that in recent uprisings, riots, and other manifestations of the revolution, that the police did more toward fostering the conditions propagating “civil disorders” than toward eliminating them. Their methods (indiscriminate billy-clubbing, shooting, tear-gassing, and mating) only inflame the latent violence already present in a situation and will naturally bring about retaliation from those mistreated.

Riots have become increasingly worse due to the fact that 1) police continue to perpetuate unjust and oppressive laws, and 2) in this application overreact, causing unnecessary bloodshed and destruction.

It should be noted that the police at Cranbrook were from rich, white communities. It is not likely that there is a revolution stirring in these neighborhoods that would warrant the use of such extreme tactics as those demonstrated by the police at Cranbrook.

It seems rather obvious, therefore, that these pigs are to be utilized in other areas where the people might challenge the status quo in an attempt to gain their own social, economic and political freedoms.

We must conclude that the racist ruling class is training mindless warriors to enter into oppressed communities in the event that the “inferior” people seek to control their own destinies.