MARYLAND, March 6—Twenty five antiracists packed a courtroom yet again to support Kevin Sneed, a Black worker who has been held for two years on bogus charges of  attempting to kill a police officer.
Convenience store footage showing  his arrest smashes the bosses’ racist lies about Sneed. It shows officers climbing in through his car windows, beating Kevin senseless until the car begins to slowly drift when Kevin could no longer hold the brake pedal down. The ruling class and their system never miss a chance to smear workers, especially Black and Latin ones.
While none of the cops who beat Kevin sustained injuries, He was battered and bruised after being pulled over supposedly for a broken tail light. After the story appeared on the local Washington, D.C. area news and in response to several packed hearings, the county prosecutor offered Kevin a deal: plead guilty to disorderly conduct and agree not to file any charges or complaints against the police department!
In this case, grass roots activism by Life after Release, a group in which Progressive Labor Party(PLP) members participate, might help one individual in a sea of racist arrests and prosecutors leaving workers to rot in prison, but in the end, capitalism thrives on perpetuating incarceration and terror among the working class. In a system where cops are praised for arresting innocent Black workers–prosecutors are praised for keeping them behind bars until they plead guilty out of desperation–and a prison system that profits from being filled to the brim, we need more than piecemeal reforms. We need to smash the capitalist system that squeezes profit out of misery and build a system that won’t function on racism and money. We need communism, and every day that we don’t grow closer to achieving that vision is another day  our working class brothers and sisters remain locked behind bars.