Chicago Police Department:
Two Lying, Murdering Chicago Pigs in Line to Train More Lying, Murdering Pigs
February 1, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Recently there was a revelation in the Chicago Tribune that two police officers, who murdered Black citizens in separate incidents and then lied under oath to justify the murders, have been selected to train other police officers.
One of the newly promoted, soon-to-be-trainers is Raoul Mosqueda, who along with his partner Gildardo Sierra shot Darius Pinex to death in January 2011 during a “traffic stop.” The other is Michael St. Clair II who shot William Hope, Jr. to death in July 2010.
In separate court suits brought by the Pinex and Hope families, both St. Clair and Mosqueda each gave sworn testimony that was contradicted by tapes from the time of the murders.
The revelation of these two lying murdering pigs being promoted in this way followed on the heels of a damning Justice Department report which detailed the CPD’s history of trampling on the civil and human rights of its Black and Latino residents. The injustice and racism of law enforcement in Chicago is legion, and it is a concentration of what police do in cities across the U.S.
A press conference and protest was held at the Chicago district police station where Mosqueda works. It was attended by Gloria Pinex, mother of Darius Pinex, the Pinex family attorney in the civil suit, the Revolution Club, and family members and representatives of other people murdered by the police.
At the press conference Gloria stated, “[Mosqueda] lied on the witness stand. He got caught in a lie. And now he is facing a promotion—which I think is truly absurd. And I’m here demanding that he get fired [and] face criminal charges. The St. Clair guy—he killed a man in a parking lot of Popeye’s. He should be fired as well. There’s no way these officers should be training officers. You gonna train them to be liars? You gonna train them to be murderers?... And I’m not giving up with every breath in my body... He will not be a police officer for long.” She went on to say, “The city signed a check. That means nothing to me. No justice, no peace!”
Steve Greenberg, the Pinex family attorney, said, “Promoting an officer just days after you pay millions of dollars to pay off the case of the officer who killed someone and lied about it sends the wrong message…. The policy now in this police department apparently is to promote officers for killing and for lying in court…. Maybe if they started punishing the bad officers then people would get the message they shouldn’t do these things.”
The Revolution Club read BAsics 1:24:
“The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness.”
The Revolution Club went into how “we see these promotions as being right in line with Trump’s vicious call to bring in the Feds to further enforce a genocidal program.”
What the Revolution Club is pointing to can be seen at Trump’s White House website, where one of the first things done when Trump took office was the removal of the page devoted to the history of Civil Rights. Now there’s a whole section dedicated to “Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community.” It opens with a threat to anyone who would dare to challenge this full unleashing of the killers in blue: “A Trump Administration will empower our law enforcement officers to do their jobs and keep our streets free of crime and violence... The dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong. The Trump Administration will end it.” [our emphasis]
As we said in our article on the DOJ report about the Chicago police, "these police are but the spear point enforcing a whole system of high unemployment and low wages when there is work... of piss-poor education... of terrible health care and epidemic levels of high blood pressure, diabetes, AIDS, and cancer... of mass incarceration and mass eviction and homelessness... of saddling people with onerous debts from court cases and then jailing them again when they cannot pay for court costs... of the terrible demoralization and hopelessness that leads people to lash out against others who look like them... and so much more. Yes, this is a system—a system of white supremacy that lies close to the heart of this larger capitalist-imperialist system—a system that MUST be overthrown at the soonest possible time, and the ground cleared to do away with all traces of this white supremacy."
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