SANTA MONICA, CA— The Santa Monica Police Department (SMPD) is racist to the core.
It was April 21, 2015. Justin Palmer, 36-year-old, tried to use the electric car charging station in Virginia Avenue Park in Santa Monica, California, to have power to drive to work the next day. It was well before 11 PM, the closing time for the park. He waited his turn and when he pulled up to the station, it was slightly after 11 PM. A cop car arrived and told Palmer the park was closed. When he explained he had arrived before 11 PM and had to wait, the cops asked for identification. When he asked what he had done wrong, the father of four was thrown to the ground and handcuffed, and pepper sprayed in the face. Palmer suffered lingering back and shoulder injuries.
While others have been seen using the charging station after closing time, the difference here is that Justin Palmer is Black. This would have been just another racist interaction between white cops and a Black motorist. However, the police assault on Palmer was caught on camera and he was able to successfully sue the SMPD.
SMPD has a history of racist profiling. A few months after the attack on Palmer, a Black woman named Fay Wells was locked out of her apartment in a mostly white neighborhood of Santa Monica. She called a locksmith to get her back inside. A white neighbor reported a burglary and 17 cops swarmed to her building, pointing their guns at her and barging into her apartment without permission.
“21st Century Policing” = putting lipstick on a pig
When these two incidents of racist policing occurred in Santa Monica, the Chief of the SMPD was Jacqueline Seabrooks, who headed the department from 2012 to 2017. In both cases, she defended the cops. While she was the Police Chief in Inglewood from 2007 to 2012, her department was so well known for police killings of Black residents that a U.S. Department of Justice report admonished the Inglewood police and a LA Times investigation found that Inglewood cops “repeatedly resorted to physical or deadly force against unarmed suspects.”
 Seabrooks is a proponent of “21st Century Policing,” a program that came out of a Task Force created by then-President Obama in 2014 in response to the mass protests against the murder of 18-year old Michael Brown by white kkkop Darren Wilson. The goal of the Task Force was to restore people’s trust in and collaboration with law enforcement agencies, while continuing to reduce crime. It recommended the increased use of data gathering, technology and community partnerships to reduce crime.
One of the co-chairs of the Task Force was Charles Ramsey, who had once been the Chief of Police in Washington, DC. He became notorious in 2002 when he directed police to surround more than 400 people protesting against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and without ordering them to leave, arrested them all, including journalists. Ramsey was overhead saying, “We’re going to lock them up and teach them a lesson!” This is the official trying to restore faith in police departments.
Seabrooks and Ramsey are Black, and they are racist just the same. It hasn’t reduced the daily, relentless racism of police in the U.S. Santa Monica uses a form of community policing, an initiative developed by former NYPD Commissioner William Bratton in the 1990’s to encourage community collaboration with police. While community policing was the carrot used to entice people to cooperate with local police, at the same time Bratton developed the stick of “broken windows policing.” People are arrested for minor crimes like riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, or jumping a subway turnstile, or drinking alcohol from an open bottle, which would purportedly help to prevent bigger crimes. Studies have shown that “broken windows” arrests do nothing to prevent larger crimes but do have the effect of saddling mostly Black and Latin young people with criminal records that damage their chances of future employment.
Police and Santa Monica gentrification
Santa Monica now has a new Chief of Police, Cynthia Renaud, formerly the police chief of Folsom, California. She plans to hire more police for the steadily gentrifying Santa Monica, with its rising housing prices and evictions of low-income residents unable to afford the skyrocketing rents. More than 2,000 rent controlled units have been lost in Santa Monica. Meanwhile, the city has become the home of high tech and music companies such as Activision Blizzard, Sony’s Naughty Dog and Universal Music Group.
The role of the police will be to keep a lid on the growing anger of people upset with rising rents, evictions and other social problems. They will be used to harass the homeless in Santa Monica, whose numbers are increasing. And they will target Black and Latin residents for special harassment, as they’ve done in the past.
In a class divided society, the police will always be used to defend the interests of the wealthy while harassing and imprisoning the most oppressed. If we want to change that, we have to fight for a society without classes, without inequality and racism, a society based on sharing and cooperation: communism.