Statement by Carl Dix:
Justice for Sylville Smith!
ANOTHER MURDERING PIG WALKS FREE!
June 22, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On June 21, a jury just exonerated the cop who gunned down 23-year-old Sylville Smith in Milwaukee last year, putting the system’s stamp of approval on another police murder of a Black person. This murdering pig chased Smith and shot him as he ran. Then the cop came to within inches of Smith and finished him off with a shot to his chest as he lay on the ground with his hands extended. The pig’s defense was that this was following police procedure: to continue shooting until the threat was ended! This is pig-speak for saying cops get to kill Black people they suspect of crimes, including finishing them off after they wound them. And the jury bought their justification for murder.
This is the most recent in a wave of outrageous exonerations of murdering pigs. Days earlier a jury in Minnesota exonerated the cop who murdered Philando Castile. In May, a Tulsa jury cut loose the pig who murdered Terence Crutcher after he walked back to his car with his hands in the air and placed them on the car. Also in May, the Department of “Justice” announced there would be no charges filed against the cops who murdered Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Last fall the charges were dropped against two cops who gunned down James Boyd, a homeless man in Albuquerque, NM, after a jury deadlocked on murder charges. And last summer charges were dropped against the last three cops involved in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore following the exonerations of the first three cops in that case.
This amounts to a statement from this system that no matter how outrageous the murders the police commit, no matter how many people have seen the videos of these murders; all the murdering pigs have to say is: “I feared for my life,” and they get a do not go to jail card.
Bob Avakian, the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), says: “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.” I challenge anybody to deny the truth of this statement.
If the brutality, terror and murder carried out by the police was the only thing wrong with this capitalist-imperialist system, that would be reason enough to get rid of it once and for all thru revolution. And this is far from the only horror this system enforces on humanity. The RCP is organizing people into a revolution to overthrow this system at the soonest possible moment. If you want to see police terror and all the other horrors humanity is subjected to ended, you need to get with this revolution.
And if you find it unacceptable that police get away with murder again and again, you need to take to the streets and act in other ways to say NO MORE to this horror. Being young and Black or Brown should not be justification for state-sponsored murder. Like the mothers of Philando Castile and Sylville Smith, everybody should be outraged when these killer cops walk free. And we must take our righteous rage to the streets!
Justice for Sylville Smith, Philando Castile and for all the victims of murdering cops!
Stop Police Terror!
The System is the problem—Revolution is the Solution!
Get a free email subscription to revcom.us:
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.