By Huey Dessalines

February 2, 2020

LOS ANGELES: Black Lives Matter activists arrived at the residence of Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey early Monday morning hoping for a community meeting. Instead, they were greeted by her husband, David Lacey, who proceeded to aim a pistol at an activist and threaten to shoot her. An account on Twitter, posted by Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at Cal State Los Angeles, and a BLM Activist, shows Lacey’s husband clearly threatening protestors with his firearm, while threatening to call the police.

Protestors showed up early and rang the doorbell to meet with the DA, who had previously expressed amenability to a community meeting with activists. Lacey, a Democrat, and the first New Afrikan DA in Los Angeles, is in a three way race with two other opponents, and activists are applying pressure that many believe will result in Lacey being unseated at the polls. Namely, activists are mobilizing against Lacey’s refusal to prosecute the murderers in the case of Ezell Ford, who was assassinated by the LAPD in 2014, along with foot-dragging in the case of Ed Buck. Buck is a wealthy Democratic Party donor who ran a drug and sex den out of his apartment, where two New Afrikan men were found dead of methamphetamine overdoses within the span of a year and a half.

Lacey’s tenure as DA shows the flawed reasoning behind “Black firsts” being applauded, and also put the lie to the myth of the “progressive prosecutor”. Prosecutors serve the interests of the ruling class, regardless of their national oppression. Lacey is a neocolonial element, a lackey of the big colonizer bourgeoisie who represents their class interests. Furthermore, the choice of David Lacey to pull a weapon on peaceful protestors shows the willingness of neocolonial lackies to commit violence in defense of their class interests and those of their masters.

This also bears attention because much of the movement is bent on maintaining a nonviolent posture, and sniffs at revolutionary Communists who continue to teach the importance of revolutionary violence to fundamentally transform the order of things under which we continue to suffer. Once again we see how the ruling class responds to pacifist approaches and attempts at dialogue. Attempting to negotiate with the enemy or fight them at the polls is a fool’s errand, because the system remains in effect. As long as the ruling class rules and is able to do so through force, there will be no respite or reprieve. There is no real hope for nonviolent or peaceful coexistence with the enemy, regardless of the ideological junk that revisionists, reformists and opportunists continue to peddle to the masses who more and more clamor to organize the revolution.

It will be the task of a reconstituted Communist Party founded on the ideological and organizational principles of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to hold enemies and abusers of the people like Jackie and David Lacey to account. Only through protracted people’s war of a new type, taking into account the concrete conditions of an imperialist metropole like the United States, can justice be won for Ezell Ford and the at least 10 victims of the serial doper and rapist, Ed Buck. The enemy does not respond to peaceful protests, pressure at the polls, petitions, or dialogue. Lacey’s position would be nothing without the army of violent, armed individuals in the service of the ruling class, meaning the LAPD, which is one of the most well equipped and funded armies in the world. To defeat such an army requires a People’s Army led by a Maoist Communist Party, capable of enforcing the will of the toiling masses, principally colonized, over this force just as they exert their force over us every waking and sleeping hour of our lives.