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Outrage on Top of Outrage on Top of Outrage: Police Crack Down in Milwaukee After Pig That Killed Sylville Smith Walks Free
June 24, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Right after a jury acquitted the Milwaukee pig who murdered Sylville Smith last year, a couple of us revcoms went up to Milwaukee to get out Carl Dix’s statement (“Justice for Sylville Smith! ANOTHER MURDERING COP WALKS FREE!“) and the Declaration from the Revolution Club Chicago. Revcoms were in Milwaukee last August when youths rose up in a righteous two-day rebellion against the murder of Sylville Smith in the face of the Wisconsin governor calling out the National Guard.
We drove by Sherman Park where the protest had occurred last year. Still standing is a burnt-out BP gas station on one corner. We saw cop cars sitting three deep, with the pigs looking straight out into the park and the nearby corner where people had gathered when Sylville Smith was murdered. Throughout the area, the pigs were stopping one car after another, lights flashing—without even the pretense of a “busted tail-light” or “failing to signal a lane change,” or even “fitting the description.” Several cop cars were just parked near “ground zero” of the rebellion, within a block of the BP station, with their lights flashing. Cop and sheriff cars and vans roamed the area for blocks around. Before the verdict in the trial of the cop who killed Smith came out, there was an article in the local paper announcing that the police would be taking over Sherman Park in advance, in preparation for the people’s reaction.
It was a total police clampdown—an outrage on top of the initial outrage of the murder of Sylville Smith and the added outrage of the acquittal of the killer pig! Where is the “right to assemble” and the “freedom of expression” that’s supposedly guaranteed under this system’s Constitution? The scene at Sherman Park showed the real class nature of American democracy—a dictatorship of the capitalist-imperialist class that monopolizes political power. As Bob Avakian sharply lays out:
The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism. (BAsics 1:3)
The blatant suppression of protest at Sherman Park was courtesy of the same police force that killed Sylville, and of the sheriffs led by David Clark, that fascist Trump suck-up and upholder of brutalization of Black people and immigrants. It’s been in the news recently that these sheriffs had killed a prisoner in their county jail last year—Terrill Thomas, a 38-year-old Black man with bipolar disorder, who was being held in solitary confinement and who died of dehydration after the pigs withheld water from him for seven days. We also learned that the Milwaukee cops had just recently shot into a car of a “suspect,” hitting two people in the vehicle and killing one.
The statement from Carl Dix that we were taking out says in part, “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.” Most people we met had positive responses to Carl’s statement, and some wanted to get in touch with the Revolution Club. We went around to various gas stations, stores, and intersections in the neighborhood to find people. A young brother took a stack of flyers to his friends and family. Many of the store owners, who were from the Middle East, took flyers. At one food mart, a Black security guard put the statement in the window and a pile of leaflets out for the customers, and took a bundle of Revolution newspapers to get out to others.
A Black woman expressed that there is fear in the community, with the police carrying heavy weapons and terrorizing people—but she felt determined that this would not stop her from going up against the murderers in blue. We got the feeling that this just scratched the surface and that there is a lot simmering among the people.
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