On Wednesday, July 22, police in Madison, Wisconsin murdered a Black man named Corey Ruiz. Three officers held him down while a fourth shot him three times in the head at point-blank range. Since then, explosive protests have rocked Madison for an entire week straight, with hundreds demanding justice for Corey Ruiz. These are the largest protests against racist police brutality since the George Floyd uprising. 

Protesters set up an encampment that shut down the entire intersection where Corey was killed, forcing the city to reroute buses and delay garbage pickup. Working people know that it will take nothing short of totally disrupting business as usual to ramp up pressure on the political establishment and jail the killer cop!

Madison Democrats have been caught completely flat-footed. Their priority has been to appease the business owners whose profits have been disrupted by the protest movement, and they have attempted to pit the movement against its community. Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, a Democrat, has insisted there is nothing she can do, and that the movement must wait for a drawn-out independent investigation in order to get justice. The Democratic Party is wholly incapable of leading any fight for Black liberation since their loyalties lie with the corporations which profit off racism and exploitation, not with working people. 

The whole working class needs to take up the fight against racist police brutality, and the struggle needs working-class leadership. The police that murder Black people are one arm of the same repressive state that arrests, deports, and shoots immigrants, and are the same police deployed to shut down picket lines and crush unions. Capitalist divide-and-rule only benefits the bosses and they fear nothing more than a multiracial, multigender working class which can shut down business as usual and grind their profits to a halt.

How Can We Win?

Led by Black youth and working people, the protest movement has forced some events and festivals in the city to be canceled or shut down. This shows the capacity for it to go even further—to shut down even larger sections of economic activity—if the outrage can be harnessed and organized around clear, bold demands.

We need to escalate the movement in order to win demands like jailing the cop who executed Corey Ruiz. The George Floyd uprising led to the establishment of the Police Civilian Oversight Board in Madison, as a concession to the movement, but it has no actual authority and functions purely as a toothless advisory board. Organized escalation is needed to fight for real democratic community control of police, which means authority over hiring, firing, discipline, and budget decisions. And we need to do it with as wide and democratic a movement as possible. 

The January 23 Minneapolis general strike is a model for how working people must fight against state terror everywhere, whether it is Trump’s ICE deportation machine or racist killer cops like Kiel Peterson. This one-day strike ended Operation Metro Surge, the militarized ICE operation which terrorized Somali and other immigrant communities in Minneapolis. 

After the May Day Strong coalition called for a nationwide day of strike action on May 1, Madison was one of just a few places across the country that actually saw entire workplaces go on strike. Educators in the union Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI) forced the school district to close, with more than 70% pledging to strike on May 1 in solidarity with the struggle for immigrant rights. Socialist Alternative members also helped organize a strike that shut down four Madison coffee shops in both union and non-union chains. Both strikes were built through militant rank-and-file organizing.

We need to flex this muscle again and organize a citywide one-day strike against racist police brutality and state repression, because workers’ ability to shut down profits means we can bring all of Madison to a standstill and force concessions on our demands. The political strike is our most powerful weapon against police brutality, repression, and state terror and should be taken up nationwide. 

Socialist Alternative Demands:

• Jail killer cop Kiel Baitinger-Peterson!
• Democratic community control of police with the power to hire, fire, discipline, and allocate resources!
• Defund the police and tax the rich to fund Madison schools and social services!