Check this footage from Jay Diamond at an event last night in New York featuring Pete Rock and Smif-n-Wessun, launching their new album Monumental.

Police stormed into the event, shut it down, told people to leave and started beating people up. As Pete Rock commented on Twitter: “Black is not da favorable color in dat area i guess!!”

General Steele of Smif-n-Wessun gives a great breakdown of what happened in the interview he gives at the end of the video:

“You can witness it was jam packed, there was no fights, no confrontations. There was all kinds of people in there, from all over the place. There was music in there, it was going off, it was poppin’. Then the police came and stormed the place, telling us we had to get out. And then they started beating on people, telling us to move away. This is what goes on in New York City. New Yorkers get frustrated when the police come in and, instead of bringing order, they create more chaos. This is what NYPD does. They create more chaos, because they don’t identify with the people… These motherfuckers is the overseers of this land right here. We witnessing it right now. I guess they bored. They can’t find no rapists, killers and criminals, so they wanna fuck up the common folk, the party-goers, the hip-hoppers, the current revolutionaries of this time. Long live hip-hop, long live free speech, long live you guys out there.”

Again we see the true nature of the police: their main function is to intimidate people, to keep them in their place, to preserve the status quo of capitalism and imperialism. They are playing the same role in Greece (where they’re attacking protestors with tear gas right now) and in England (where we have seen several deaths in police custody in recent weeks).

Let’s give the last word to the late, great J Dilla…