On Sunday, September 13th, Ricardo Munoz was shot and killed by a Lancaster Police Officer after his family had reached out for help in handling a mental health crisis. Soon after, the Lancaster Police Department invaded the neighborhood along with other law enforcement agencies, including State Troopers. As a distraught community descended on the scene demanding answers, the police assumed their usual “thin blue line, us-versus-them” demeanor.
In the ensuing hours demonstrators were met with silence as Ricardo Munoz’s body still lay where he fell with no coroner on site. As demands for answers fell on deaf ears, grief turned to anger. As Martin Luther King, Jr once remarked, “the riot is the language of the unheard”, and so it was on Sunday. The demonstration moved downtown to the police station, where instead of answers, the community was met with riot cops. Protesters demanded to know how a call for help ended in the death of a friend, a neighbor, a brother, a son.
Lancaster police answered with bull horns and chemical agents, including what appeared to be 40mm rubber-tipped tear gas projectiles and CS gas grenades, designed to cause a burning sensation so intense that protesters cannot keep their eyes open while causing irritation of the lungs severe enough to produce profuse coughing, disorientation, and difficulty breathing.
When the tear gas dissipated and the fires burned out, eight protesters had been arrested, charged with arson, rioting, and vandalism. The windows of the police station and Post Office had been broken, as well as the windows of a few local businesses. In the 24hrs following, five more people were arrested on similar charges. Six of the initial eight had their bail set at $1 million, an outrageous decision by Magisterial Judge Bruce Roth. Progressive organizations in Lancaster and around the country quickly denounced the excessive bail, which Lt Governor Fetterman called “unconstitutional”. Eventually, the defendants had bail reduced to between $25,000 to $100,000 depending on their individual charges (LNP 9/16). As of this writing nine of the thirteen people arrested are out on bail. The remaining three adults remain in prison waiting to post bail and the minor’s case is being handled in juvenile’s court.
The excessively high bail set for demonstrators is a clear attempt to intimidate progressive elements in the city, to crush the growing political movement demanding that police and city officials be held accountable for their actions. Lancaster City has been a Democratic stronghold for decades, yet the very same Democrats who are lamenting the egregious bail amounts are at the same time decrying the “violence”, blaming outside agitators for the damage. While it is true that some people arrested on Sunday night were from out of town, the events of that night were a long time in the making. Even before the pandemic set in, people in Lancaster City were struggling to make ends meet. Rising housing prices, stagnant wages, low-wage jobs, and of course police brutality have weighed heavily on city residents for decades.
The demonstrations that rocked the city–and the world–this summer are symptomatic of the conditions created by the pandemic, economic crisis, and racial injustice. Ever greater sections of the working class are finding themselves thrown out of their homes and their jobs, more and more abandoned by local, state, and federal politicians. While some relief was available to some of the working class, it was never more than temporary. The eviction moratoriums only keep people housed until the moratorium ends, and then back rent comes due. It’s still too early to tell the extent of the job loss in the county, but we can expect many jobs won’t return, and those that do will find pay cuts or freezes, and either forced overtime or shorter hours, depending on the job. In any case, it’s the working class who bears the burden of the crisis.
This is not an accident.
The recent history of Lancaster, like many cities around the country, proves that the Democrats represent the capitalist class as much as the Republicans. The apparent polarization within US society is, in essence, a struggle between competing factions of capitalists. The true “sin” of the protesters on Sunday night was not “violence” (something the capitalist class visits on People of Color every day), but the desecration of the holiest of holy relics in capitalist society, private property.
The police are free to deploy munitions banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention for use in international conflicts (CS Gas), use pepper spray on protesters demanding police reform, and tase individuals attempting to comply with contradictory orders, but damage to private property is a line that cannot be crossed.
Even as the bail amounts were lowered, the decision to levy $1 million bail at all must be viewed as a part of a larger effort to undermine a growing progressive political movement not only in Lancaster, but across the country. In 2017, after the protests at the Inauguration, the federal government arrested 234 people on vandalism and rioting charges carrying a possible 60 year sentence. The State got zero courtroom convictions and dropped the charges.
The same year, bills were introduced into the PA senate that would create a special category of felony criminal trespass for protesting at pipelines, fracking rigs, and other places considered “critical infrastructure”. Luckily that bill was killed in the House in 2017 and never made it to a floor vote. Lancaster’s very own state senator Scott Martin proposed a bill in 2017 as well, one that would make protesters pay “government expense” for responding to their demonstrations if they were convicted of any felony or misdemeanor. This bill also went nowhere. More recently, protesters were snatched off the street in Portland after the George Floyd protests, tactics that are being deployed in Lancaster right now. Representatives from Green Dreamz, a local civil rights organization stated police jumped out of a van, held a small group at gunpoint and arrested Kathryn Patterson and Taylor Enterline. While the Lancaster Police says they only used one unmarked car to make arrests, the aggressive nature of the arrests is worrying.
The DA, magisterial justices, and police are all part of the same armed wing of State power, with the police specifically purposed to maintain the social conditions necessary for capital to produce profits. They “protect and serve” capital, not the people. Social unrest interrupts the process of production regardless of the source and therefore interrupts the production of profit. The police have historically been used to break strikes; we now see the same tactics in how they are attempting to break Black Lives Matter.
The State thinks it can crush the resistance of the poor and working class, but as long as the fundamental conditions of their suffering exist, the resistance of the people will continue. Capitalism creates immense material wealth side by side with suffering and misery for workers, constraining them under the system of wage labor which renders them employable only insofar as their labor increases their employer’s profits, and when their labor is no longer necessary, tosses them out on the street.
A movement is rising. As long as housing prices rise while wages remain stagnant, as long as people are unemployed in a world of plenty for the ruling class, as long as resistance to state power results in state violence, resistance to the capitalist class will remain. The poor and working class are rising from their slumber and slowly shaking off the cobwebs. The people in the street, especially the young people, have proven they are willing to withstand any injustice in order to change society. The heroic action of those arrested confronting State violence during the George Floyd Protests in late May and early June, the March for Human Rights and Against Police Terror in early August, and most recently in the protests of last weekend have set us an example. In the words of Karl Marx “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
Drop the charges!
End cash bail!
Release all political prisoners!