8 May 2015 – For Immediate Release

Night Demo Against Police Terror

ALL OUT FOR TANNER CURRIE:

“Condemn Labreche! Condemn the System!”

A new wave of discussion, energy and action around police racism and brutality is sweeping across the continent. We have yet to see a manifestation of this movement locally, but that is not for a lack of cause.  In Sudbury the cops disproportionately target First Nations people and especially women, racialized workers and youth, sex workers, the unemployed, and other oppressed groups.  Greater Sudbury Police is beefed up each year while ever more people sink into poverty and misery. Recently tasers were made standard-issue for even the lowliest officer on the force.

Over the past few weeks the Sudbury Revolutionary Network (SRN) has been talking about these problems with people in the working class neighbourhoods of Sudbury.  Harassment, bullying, eviction, assault and surveillance are reported as a daily reality on their streets and at their door-steps, on top of all the other struggles of proletarian life in capitalist society.  One woman  commented:  "Once they find out you’re Native, you're screwed.  They're really mean to you."

One particularly cruel cop, Constable Christopher Labreche, comes up again and again.  He is best known for smashing local youth Tanner Currie face-first into a window while Tanner was in police custody, cracking the glass with the force.  He happened to be caught on video this time, allowing his victim to leverage the bourgeois media and legal system so the State could not pretend nothing had happened. There was no choice but to charge one of their most faithful servants, but at the same time the bigger problem of police terror and occupation of our communities was narrowed to one cop alone.

Labreche will be in court on May 13 for “assault causing bodily harm”.  However an earlier internal police investigation has already set the tone for the coming show: he was merely suspended, and with pay! Even if the courts find him guilty, this isolated conviction can never deliver true justice to the communities he has terrorized for so long.  It would only deflect popular anger away from the institution of police itself.  The justice we deserve will be denied unless and until we shake our misplaced faith in bourgeois institutions and leadership, clearly identify the cops as the street-level protectors of a barbaric socio-economic system, and organize the independent power of the people to liberate their communities from the capitalist class and their armed forces.

As the first step in this struggle SRN has been agitating on the streets for a mass action on the evening of Wednesday, May 13. Labreche’s court appearance is a chance to launch a broader campaign for unity among all organizations and individuals in Sudbury and Manitoulin region who are opposed to police tyranny. Gather with us outside the Sudbury Courthouse at 7:30pm, with the recognition that:

1. The courts and prisons are a necessary part of the same settler-colonial capitalist system that sees oppressed peoples brutalized and killed by the police daily.

2. This system protects the interests of the wealthy ruling class and their allies at the expense of everyone else.  If you don’t have money, power, privilege, then no level of the legal system serves you.

3. Therefore it can never hold its repressive arm accountable to the very people whom it is meant to suppress.  The only way to ensure the long-term safety and livelihood of the people is by organizing mass action against the whole system.

Stand with us in rejecting false bourgeois “justice”, and help to convene a Peoples’ Court outside the courthouse of the ruling class (where we clearly have no say).  Let’s begin to define a new justice based on the interests of the proletarian and popular masses, and build our capacity to enforce it as part of the revolutionary struggle to end all oppression and exploitation, for complete justice and total liberation!

The proceedings will be followed by a determined march through streets and neighbourhoods that will one day be reclaimed by the people!  Bring flags, drums, signs, megaphones and torches.

For more information contact

Sudbury Revolutionary Network at:

SudburyRevnet@gmail.com or facebook.com/SudRevnet

And visit our website:

SudRevnet.wordpress.com