Gates and Hongisto: Two sides of the same coin

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Daryl Gates has been blasted by liberals as an advocate of roughhouse police tactics. They point to the 56 baton blows to Rodney King's head and body by Gates' finest, as an example of a police department out of control. They and others demanded Gates' resignation and his replacement by a more "sensitive" cop. The new police chief will be Black and supposedly more in touch with the community.

We'll see. But considering the fundamental purpose of cops in our society—to protect the property of the rich don't hold your breath expecting much positive change.

The "People's" Cop We in San Francisco recently experienced a "people's" cop. In fact, our top cop, Richard Hongisto, is a well-known liberal in a city full of liberals. His appointment by the former police chief, now mayor of San Francisco, Frank Jordan, was a surprise. Jordan ran for mayor as an "outsider" and pledged more law and order in a city known worldwide as liberal and tolerant.

Hongisto, on the other hand, was a member of the Board of Supervisors and county assessor. He claimed to be (maybe still is) a strong supporter of civil rights, gay rights, women's rights, and the overall liberal agenda. What more could the working people of San Francisco want?

We soon found out. In response to the jury's verdict of "innocent" for the cops who beat up Rodney King, there was not only a rebellion in Los Angeles, but large protests in San Francisco. Led by young people of all colors, the Bay Bridge was blocked for hours, protesters marched in the financial district, and rallies were held all over the city.

What did our new mayor and police chief do? They suspended civil liberties, declared a 9:00 p.m. curfew, and decreed that all protests would be considered "unlawful assemblies."

Hongisto sent out the city's "finest" and began arresting anyFired!

one at or near the protests. Even a reporter for the national magazine, Business Week, was picked up in the round-up.

No one was warned before the arrests started. Many protesters were roughed up. Most were held in jammed cells for hours before being allowed to make a phone call for help. Few were charged. Even the mayor's aide was beaten by a cop, even after identifying herself.

Hongisto's blue troops enjoyed themselves. They couldn't believe how "great" a police chief they had gotten. He led the campaign personally. At nights after office hours, Hongisto traveled the streets with his foot soldiers. He quickly became known as "the cop's cop."

Civil Rights? Humbug!

The outcry against Hongisto's methods, however, led to protests across the city. The S.F. Board of Supervisors, who had earlier unaminously approved the state of emergency, refused Hongisto's and Jordan's request to extend it a few more days.

Even the big-business dailies cried foul-mainly because the curfew was wiping out receipts for businesses downtown.

What happened to democratic rights? Hongisto in a typical arrogant manner replied: sometimes civil liberties must be abridged to protect the greater rights of the public. Law and order, he added, is what the people of San Francisco deserve and want.

Sounds familiar doesn't it? You've heard military dictators in Latin America, Africa, and Asia argue the same point to deny "their" people their basic democratic rights.

Yet most American politicians and cops are taught not to say such things in public. We Americans fought hard for our civil rights and don't take lightly our rights being thrashed. Cops are told to keep mum in public while trampling on civil liberties in practice. Gates and other other top cops have done so for decades.

Hongisto was so taken by his "success" in keeping the S.F. protests under control, he decided to go after other critics. After the Bay Area free newspaper, the Bay Times ran a doctored front page photo of Hongisto with a night stick thrusting upward from his groin, Hongisto "suggested" to three cops that they remove hundreds of copies of the paper from news racks. They did so.

The public uproar, coming on the heels of his mass arrests of protesters, led Jordan's handpicked Police Commission to fire Hongisto. The point was obvious-and disengenuous: it was Hongisto who violated civil rights, not the mayor or other top city officials.

A Cop Is A Cop What lessons can we from the Hongisto affair? liberals are wringing their draw Many hands By Malik Miah trying to rationalize how their "friend" Hongisto could be so brutal and undemocratic. They have all decided it was a personality problem. Wrong.

I submit: Gates and Hongisto are flip sides of the same coin. So are the handful of Black police chiefs and the few top female cops. A cop is a cop is a cop. Liberal or conservative: Black or white. Male or female. Gates and Hongisto have the same job: protect the property of the well-to-do; and arrest workers, especially minorities, when they protest injustice. Civil liberties be damned if it interferes with their job.

What working people want— particularly what Black people demand—is a police force under their control. They want an end to police terror. They want the four LA cops who beat King fired and charged under federal law. Blacks want an end to the police occupation of their communities.

We can't win all of this yet. That will take a mass revolutionary movement that throws the ruling rich out of political power. But through mass protests now—using our democratic rights won in struggle-we can push back the cops and their puppeteers in the city, state, and federal governments.

ing for a return to the values of ascetic Buddhism. He called on the demonstrators to stick to pacifist forms of protest. But the big press version of the Thai upsurge as a "Yuppie revolution" is clearly a distortion. It had a very radical dynamic.

Police posts were attacked and burned around Bangkok. The demonstrators were largely young, and the students played a major role, even though the revolutionary organizations that existed in the 1970s upsurge were destroyed.

In the May 20 NRC Handelsblad, Kemenade described the situation after the initial mass demonstration: "There is a mood of massive popular anger, and there seems to be more than a minimal disposition for suicidal heroism. For the entire night, tens of thousands of people, largely students but also middle-class people, occupied strategic points at Ramkhamhaeng University and blocked them with heavy trucks.

"Students danced on the trucks and shouted slogans for hours against Suchinda... About 4:00 or 5:00 a.m., columns of young bikers brought information or rumors about troop movements on the capital. They were cheered like heroes."

The protests against Suchinda assuming the premiership, when he had been elected by no one and had promised not to take official leadership of the government, undoubtedly offered an opportunity for the downtrodden and alienated to express their accumulated anger against the brutal exploitation and humiliation of the Thai people.

Now that the pot has boiled over, all the bourgeois political forces in the country are apt to find that it will be hard to get the lid back on. There is now an opportunity for rebuilding a revolutionary and working-class alternative in one of Washington's bastions in Southeast Asia.