In 2016, indigenous people's groups marched to the United States embassy in the Philippines to protest the imperialist-directed militarization, development aggression and landgrabbing in their ancestral lands.

The Philippine police protected who?

The answer: Philippine police protected imperialist interests—in this case, the United States. The police is also currently protecting China's imperialist interests now, but it is also necessary to state that the police is and has always been an apparatus of American imperialism.

The Philippine police is rooted in the United States-created and -trained Philippine Constabulary. Tactics used in racialized police violence in America were tested and borrowed from America's imperialist quest for colonial subjugation of territories such as the Philippines.

America's quest for colonial subjugation continues in the form of its funding and support for counterinsurgency campaigns such as Oplan Bayanihan—the subject of the protest in the video—which started under Noynoy Aquino's term and ended December 2016 under Rodrigo Duterte.

This goes beyond a question of presidents—though Rodrigo Duterte hypes up police violence in its most brutal—but the police has always been a tool of state fascism, an appendage of imperialist, colonial, and ruling-class interests in almost, if not all parts of the world.

Police violence, despite nuances in context, is the universal language of oppression. After all, the racist state fascism in America's own fences share a congruent, dark history with America's racist rhetoric in justifing its quest for imperialist hegemony outside its borders.