From Carl Dix:
Justice for Freddie Gray—Convict the Killer Cops & Send Them to Jail!
December 7, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Carl Dix is co-initiator of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network and #RiseUpOctober, and a representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
The trial of the first of the Baltimore cops who murdered Freddie Gray has begun, and we need to be clear on some things. First, these murdering pigs are going on trial because people exploded in rebellion after these pigs murdered him. And second, putting the murdering cops on trial doesn’t equal justice.
Cops who kill people almost never go on trial. In the few cases where cops have been put on trial for murdering or brutalizing people, the killer cops either get off scot-free or with a slap on the wrist. The prosecutors who are so skilled at sending Black and Latino people to prison forget how to prosecute.
Let’s be clear, these cops chased Freddie Gray like he was a runaway slave, beat him down, hog-tied him and threw him onto the floor of their police van. Then they drove around the city stopping five times, giving him what Baltimore pigs call the “rough ride.” And these pigs ignored his cries of pain and pleas to go to a hospital. Their actions and inactions stole Freddie’s life. Justice in this case means these cops being convicted and going to jail, not just put on trial. And making that happen is going to take a real fight; people taking to the streets with defiance and determination demanding Justice for Freddie Gray.
We’ve seen police all across the country gunning people down, beating them to death, choking them to death, tasing them to death. This official terror has been built into the fabric of this system from the very beginning of this country; first in slave patrols, followed by KKK night riders and lynch mobs after slavery was ended, and today with police patrolling inner-city communities like an occupying army.
This horror must be STOPPED. The people who run this system have no solution to these horrors. They talk about having a conversation to heal the divisions between the community and the police or about reforms like putting body cameras on cops.
But revolution, communist revolution, has a solution to this and all the other horrors this system brings down—the attacks on women, devastation of the environment of the very planet we live on, the wars for empire, the attacks on immigrants; all of them. That solution is revolution, and we have the leadership needed for this revolution in Bob Avakian (BA), the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The revolution could STOP this state-sponsored violence right after seizing power from the capitalist rulers. The police departments that enforce brutality and murder today would be dismantled, and a people’s security force would be created to replace them. As BA says in BAsics (his book of quotations and short essays), this security force would be made up of people who would sooner lose their own lives than kill or injure an innocent person.
If you want to see the horror of police getting away with murder ended once and for all, you need to engage BA’s new approach to making revolution to get rid of this blood-sucking system and bring into being a society with totally different economic, political, and social relations and is in transition to a classless, communist world. And you need to get with the movement for revolution the RCP is building.
And everyone with an ounce of justice in their hearts needs to join in building a fight to get the cops who murdered Freddie Gray convicted and sent to jail.
PUT THE KILLER COPS IN CELL BLOCKS!
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