Debunking the Myth that Police are the Solution to Domestic Violence
On July 20th, the Chicago SWAT team responded to a domestic violence case in Albany Park. That morning, 42-year-old Daniel Aguirre threatened, beat, and held his partner and 14-year-old daughter hostage at gunpoint in their second-floor apartment. When his partner’s 67-year-old mother tried to come to her daughter and granddaughter’s aid, Aguirre shot her in the face, leaving her alive but in critical condition. A SWAT team officer was also shot but is alive and in stable condition. In the end, Aguirre released his hostages and was taken into custody.
The media response to this incident quickly focused attention on the injured SWAT officer, painting a heroic narrative of law enforcement swooping in and saving the day. This sentiment was echoed by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson who, in a press conference following the incident, commented on the case and the police response: “It’s unfortunate that domestic violence exists in the way that it does in this city, but we are grateful that our police department, as well as our SWAT team in particular, were able to de-escalate the situation and prevent further harm,” said Johnson.
While we are relieved to know that the women and child involved in this incident are safe, we are disgusted by the narrative being pushed by Johnson and the media that somehow the pigs are the solution for the “unfortunate” victims of domestic violence in this city. We want to take the time to remind Johnson of why that’s a woefully false and call on him to face the living nightmare that victims of domestic violence face from the pigs and prosecutors who do little to keep them safe.
“Well, we’re hiring” – CPD’s response to sexual assault survivors
In February 2025, a crowd of 160 righteously angry Logan Square residents attended a CPD beat meeting to confront the police over a string of attacks on women on the street, with no resolution. While CPD claimed they arrested someone at the meeting, they failed to mention the man they arrested had been released with no charges and they had no further updates on how they’d address the attacks. Instead, the police left much of the work to survivors, who banded together to support each other and share information to keep the neighborhood on alert. As the meeting continued, CPD officials, flustered by the unexpected turnout and media attention, did everything possible to deflect the blame for their incompetence onto other agencies and even mockingly suggested that survivors of sexual assault and other neighborhood residents not satisfied with their abysmal efforts should join the force.
Dare to Struggle asked people after the meeting about their thoughts on this unresolved crisis in the northwest neighborhoods. One person, in particular, exposed the kind of bullshit police hero nonsense Johnson would like us to fall for:
“….What [CPD] brought to this meeting was essentially “cut us a break, we’re trying really hard, but these things take a long time. It’s out of our hands, the rape kit backlog, that’s a different agency, so we’re so sorry, but you guys basically look out for yourselves and buy a Ring camera and make sure it surveils as much of the street as possible so that you can basically solve this yourself and wait for more crimes to happen and then call in tips.…All of these things are insulting. The Chicago socialist alders are sitting there being like “oh the police are trying so hard.”
Many in attendance of that meeting were disgusted by CPD’s response to residents and that progressive alders Jessie Fuentes and Carlos Ramirez-Rosa were protecting rather than grilling the pigs for their lack of support for victims. Despite initial attacks reported in May of 2022, it would take three years and 11 months before 36-year-old Chakib Mansour Khodja was arrested and charged with several counts of sexual assault. Had the pigs acted with any care for victims, it would not have taken three years to make an arrest and secure charges. It should have taken one victim to produce a determined response from police to protect survivors, not several.
50+ 911 calls until she was forced to make it stop
On October 22, 2022, 33-year-old Keshia Golden was 8 months pregnant. Her life took a drastic turn when Keshia’s abuser (the father of her unborn child) attacked her, slamming her head against a kitchen counter. In an attempt to save her own life and that of her unborn child, Keshia grabbed a nearby knife and stabbed her abuser in the leg. She fled the scene only to find out later he died as a result of this act of self-defense, an outcome she did not expect. Keshia is now fighting a first-degree murder charges for killing her abuser in self-defense.
Between 2021 and 2022, Keshia estimates she called 911 over 50 times reporting instances of abuse, and in July 2022, she received an Order of Protection against her abuser. Still, the police and the courts failed Keshia, forcing her into a situation where she had to choose between her and her child’s life or that of her abuser. She rightly chose to defend herself, and she and her now three-year-old daughter are alive today because of her brave actions. Instead of offering compassion to Keshia, police and prosecutors under the authority of Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen Burke are determined to paint Keshia as a monster and criminalize her right to self-defense. Keshia joins Vanessa Sanders, Towanda Price, and other criminalized survivors who the state has persecuted for choosing to live rather than do what is expected of them: submit to abuse or death at the hands of their abusers. For Mayor Johnson, who claims that victims can rely on CPD to save the day, we ask: why didn’t they save Keshia when she called them over 50 times asking for help? Why did they arrest her when their inaction forced her to defend her life and kill her abuser?
When they abuse their own: sexual assault and killings within CPD
Johnson’s comments are even more disgusting when considering sexual assault and violence within CPD. When 40% of pigs across the country commit acts of domestic violence, it’s no surprise the police feel entitled to not only shoot and kill but exploit and abuse women, even in their own ranks.
In 2025, ProPublica and the Invisible Institute published a report documenting that over the last 10 years, 14 CPD officers had records of repeated sexual assaults. This number does not account for cases dismissed or suppressed, particularly in the police academy, and is likely much, much higher. For CPD recruit Alexus Byrd-Maxey, her sexual assault by fellow recruit Eric Tabb was not only suppressed by police academy leadership, but Tabb was also allowed to become a police officer. To add insult to injury, Byrd-Maxey was expelled from the academy. It was later uncovered that she was not Tabb’s only victim, with four other women (out of 17 in her academy class) stepping forward to say he had also assaulted them. Tabb, who smirked at Byrd-Maxey after she confronted him for assaulting her, was sentenced to 30 measly months of probation for attacking multiple women. However, his punishment was likely decreased with reports indicating that Tabb took a deal and enrolled in a sexual offender program in exchange for some charges being dropped. Regardless, with little remorse or accountability, CPD officials gave Tabb a pass for abusing women who wanted to become police officers. The same police force, you’ll recall, that the pigs instructed survivors to join to solve their own abuse.
A similar lack of accountability was granted to killer pig and abuser Carlos Baker. In June 2025, Baker shot and killed his partner Krystal Rivera after they encountered and chased a man into an apartment building. Baker claims he accidentally shot Krystal, but bodycam footage shows Baker shooting her point blank, leaving her to bleed out for two minutes before dragging her body to be tended to by other responding officers. Instead of defending Krystal and investigating her death, Johnson and then CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling led the charge to protect Baker and his abuse of women, including fellow female officers. First, they blamed two men, Jaylin Arnold and Adrian Rucker, for Krystal’s killing. But when it was reported that Baker fired at Krystal, they quickly called her murder an accident. Johnson and Snelling ignored Baker and Krystal’s past romantic relationship, her efforts to get reassigned and get away from Baker, the fact that Baker showed up unannounced at Krystal’s home the day before she was killed, and that Baker’s supervisor had recommended he be placed under strict supervision for misconduct a month before the fatal shooting. But as further proof of how useless CPD is, Baker’s supervisors failed to follow through on their own recommendation for supervision, and, instead, allowed Baker to operate freely. Had Baker been placed under supervision, he could have been transferred to a different unit, made to switch partners, and forced to check in routinely about his whereabouts – all of which could have helped save Krystal’s life.
Finally, one of the most egregious examples of domestic violence in CPD ranks that remains unpunished is the assassination attempt orchestrated by Detective Marco Torres against a female officer he was physically, mentally, and sexually abusing. The federal lawsuit that the female officer (Jane Doe) filed as a last-ditch effort to bring accountability against Torres alleges that after she tried to cut ties with him, he threatened to kill her and himself. Torres even went so far as to attempt to hire a hitman to “get rid” of Doe by sending a text message to another officer saying, “Keep this app number change your mind text it here i need her address so this guy from gangs can get rid of her he wants a grand he was good on gang intel keep it between us.” When Doe reported the abuse to the CPD Bureau of Internal Affairs (BIA), she was punished while Torres got off scot-free: Doe lost her assignment on the homicide unit and was told not to speak about why, or else she would upset the department. After all of this evidence was submitted to CPD officials, a long timeline of inaction and ignorance from higher-ups led to incomplete investigations and no consequences for Torres. It was only after Doe filed an order of protection through the courts that Torres was forced to give up his right to carry a gun. To add insult to injury, instead of doing the bare minimum and firing Torres, he is still on the department’s payroll. Every step of the way, CPD and the BIA protected Torres and punished Jane Doe for attempting to escape her abuse and seek justice.
Today (if they’re not actively working as police), all of the cops mentioned in the above instances walk free with little to no consequences for their violent actions—proving Johnson’s CPD to not only be enemies of the masses they stalk and kill on the regular but also women everywhere, including within their ranks.
Police, Patriarchy and why we need revolution
For all of the above reasons, Johnson’s claims that police are the solution to domestic violence in this city are not only false but downright despicable. Why? Because police will never be the solution to combating women’s oppression under capitalism. Capitalism, from its beginnings in this country, is built on the division of men and women that turned women from persons into objects that could be exploited for sex and their ability to have children. This division was rooted in property ownership but has been maintained for centuries by violence and persecution towards women and third gender people, people whose existence defies the gender division between men and women.
When capitalism was forming in Europe, public land that could be used by everyone became privately owned and passed down through a new system of male inheritance. For men to pass down property, they had to secure the paternity of male heirs, so women were forced out of public life into the household to have and raise children. With their confinement in the household, women and their children became a secondary form of property for their husbands and fathers, and their subjugation helped establish gender roles in society: men were the owners and breadwinners, while women were in charge of birthing, raising children, and sexually satisfying their husbands. Other ideas about male superiority followed suit, including the ridiculous notion that men are somehow stronger, smarter, and more reliable than women for simply being men. For propertyless men who were forced to toil for their food and upkeep, the development of patriarchy, or the right of men to dominate women, bought off their loyalty to capitalism. If they could own nothing but their labor, they could at least own exploit the sexual and reproductive labor of their wives and marry off their daughters for a price. Third gender people, who existed in pre-capitalist societies and continue to exist today, were also persecuted and killed to maintain the division between men and women – a practice that continues today.
The rearrangement of society via private property and male inheritance was transferred over through European colonialism and equally enforced through violence, persecution, and coercion in the Americas. While the status of women, nonbinary and trans people has changed since the early days of capitalism in this country: we’ve entered the workforce and have gained sexual and reproductive rights through political struggle; the rights we’ve won have not ended our oppression and have even been rolled back (i.e., the right to an abortion). Instead, the division between men and women and the right of men to oppress us continues to be at the foundation of capitalism today, expressed through sexual violence and harassment, the commodification of our bodies through sex work, porn, and online influencer culture, the murder of trans women and demonization of trans people, the failure of police, the courts, and policies to come to our aid, and the criminalization of our right to self defense by any means when our lives are put in danger. As we’ve laid out in this article, the same oppression exists within and is maintained by law enforcement. Why then are we expected to see the pigs as the solution to domestic violence?
What political leaders like Brandon Johnson don’t want us to understand is that policing under capitalism is designed to oppress and cause harm to people on behalf of the ruling class, the class that benefits from capitalism. The ability of the ruling class to control all the things people labor collectively across the planet to produce–food, shelter, medicine, etc. and sell it to us for profit is maintained by their armed force, whether the army abroad or the police domestically, who are ready to shoot and kill anyone who rebels against this arrangement. Police in turn become an occupying force in blocks and neighborhoods, serving their own interests, whether at the level of the individual officer that rapes, steals, and kills us and each other with the protection of a badge, or the unions that ensure law enforcement remain well-funded and protected. And where patriarchy exists in all spheres of society, there is no greater place for men to exercise their right to dominate women and all of society than in law enforcement. So no, Brandon, police are not the solution. Rather, what law enforcement under capitalism has to offer women is only further abuse, neglect, and violence. That is, so long as the system is allowed to continue.
So how can women and all those oppressed by patriarchy liberate themselves from this violent hellscape?
The real solution is revolution: the civil war required to overthrow the ruling class and thus eliminate divisions created by capitalism in society, including patriarchy. To make revolution in this country, we believe women and trans people must play a central role in revolution by engaging the whole of society, including men, to take up the fight for women’s liberation and the elimination of patriarchy. Here and now, the struggle for revolution begins by supporting women like Keshia, Vanessa, and Towanda who have been criminalized for defending themselves against their abusers. These brave women must be supported; their stories and experiences should be brought into public life and openly discussed; and their oppressors – the police, the courts, and the attorneys that support and uphold their abuse – should be the object of fierce opposition by masses of people, not just activists or individual survivors. If you agree, join us as we build mass support for Keshia as she prepares to go to trial on August 24th. Take the pledge in our bio and come out to rallies, events, and gatherings in the lead-up to and during Keshia’s trial. It is up to us to free Keshia, to vindicate her name, and to fight to end the system that tries to keep her and countless others in a state of submission.
Dare to Struggle 