Justice Department Hires Professional Liar to Justify Murder By Police
This System IS a Nightmare—and Those Who Run and Enforce It ARE Ghouls!
August 17, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian:
Editor’s note: Tyisha Miller was a 19-year-old African-American woman shot dead by Riverside, California police in 1998. Miller had been passed out in her car, resulting from a seizure, when police claimed that she suddenly awoke and had a gun; they fired 23 times at her, hitting her at least 12 times, and murdering her. Bob Avakian addressed this.
If you can’t handle this situation differently than this, then get the fuck out of the way. Not only out of the way of this situation, but get off the earth. Get out of the way of the masses of people. Because, you know, we could have handled this situation any number of ways that would have resulted in a much better outcome. And frankly, if we had state power and we were faced with a similar situation, we would sooner have one of our own people’s police killed than go wantonly murder one of the masses. That’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re actually trying to be a servant of the people. You go there and you put your own life on the line, rather than just wantonly murder one of the people. Fuck all this “serve and protect” bullshit! If they were there to serve and protect, they would have found any way but the way they did it to handle this scene. They could have and would have found a solution that was much better than this. This is the way the proletariat, when it’s been in power has handled—and would again handle—this kind of thing, valuing the lives of the masses of people. As opposed to the bourgeoisie in power, where the role of their police is to terrorize the masses, including wantonly murdering them, murdering them without provocation, without necessity, because exactly the more arbitrary the terror is, the more broadly it affects the masses. And that’s one of the reasons why they like to engage in, and have as one of their main functions to engage in, wanton and arbitrary terror against the masses of people.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 2:16
From a reader:
The August 1, 2015 edition of the New York Times ran an article about a “Dr.” Bill Lewinski. Reading it, I couldn’t help but flash to the part in the film BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! where, after running through just some of the murderous crimes of this system (in particular those by the Democrats), Bob Avakian exclaims, “These people are ghouls!”
According to this article, Lewinski is a psychology professor. For the last 25 years, he has made a career out of developing the theoretical justification, in court and in public opinion, for any and all murders by police, and he founded the Force Science Institute to conduct “research” for this. There apparently is no crime by police bad enough that he won’t jump to defend, actually saying police have no choice. He has testified in hundreds of cases of murder by police, including for the cop that murdered Oscar Grant in the San Francisco Bay Area; one of the cops who murdered James Boyd, a homeless man in Albuquerque, which was videotaped by a cop body camera; the cop who murdered Anthony Dwain Lee in LA, a Black Hollywood actor who was shot through a window—in the back—during a costume party on Halloween; and many, many more.
Lewinski calls his work “science”—work that is widely criticized as invalid and called “pseudoscience” (fake science) by the scientific community for its method, and is never subjected to any peer review—to “prove” in court that cops have no choice but to shoot, at any time. He has latched onto and twisted a thing called “inattentional blindness,” a term developed by two real psychologists (one of whom denounces Lewinski’s work in this same New York Times article), to justify things like police shooting people in the back or at a car that has gone past them, and the cops just have to say they didn’t realize that the “threat” had passed.
But this isn’t even the worst part of this story. Anyone who still feels that federal investigations or better training for cops is the way to solve the genocide against Black and Brown people we are witnessing today, pay attention: After a review in 2012, the Justice Department said Lewinski’s work lacked basic elements of legitimate research and drew conclusions that were unsupported by the data. Then last year, one year after this review, as part of a settlement over excessive force in the Seattle Police Department, the Justice Department endorsed sending cops to this same Lewinski for training. Let me say that again: After being exposed for brutality against the people, police were sent to get trained in how to do it even better—by the federal Justice Department! In January, Lewinski was paid $15,000 to train federal marshals. He also trains local police departments around the country.
This system really is an intolerable and profoundly unnecessary nightmare. We easily will do much better than this, starting day one after a revolution.
Get with BA and the revolution, and let’s solve this.
Download and share:
PDF for Print |
Download JPG
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.
