socialismartnature:

Amy Muldoon looks at the role of police and their attitude toward political protest.

 … In all of these instances [of police brutality], most people think the problem is that these are the acts of a “few bad apples.” But taken together, one has to ask: Should an orchard producing so many bad apples be allowed to continue operating?

 … Occupy Wall Street’s slogan “We are the 99 percent” both illuminates and confuses this reality. On the one hand, it is absolutely true that a tiny parasitical minority of economically powerful people who benefit from control over the immense wealth they have stolen from the rest of us.

However, this begs the question of how do they manage to hold on to what they have taken from us? While we are often ruled by ideological justifications for inequality in society—that we can’t redistribute the wealth, or we shouldn’t—in the final instance, we are prevented by the existence of a government (or, as Marxists would say, the state) that has the monopoly of violence and uses it to keep the intense inequality in place.

Police are a necessity in all class societies, not to stop crime, which they do a miserable job at, but to enforce a social order that will never allow the liberation of the oppressed or economic justice.