Days and Nights of Protest After St. Louis Judge Acquits Pig Who Murdered
Anthony Lamar Smith
THIS is What Justice Looks Like in America

Updated September 19, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Tuesday, September 19: Monday night marked the fourth day and night in a row that people of all ages and nationalities have taken to the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, condemning and refusing to accept the “not guilty” verdict handed down by a judge for the cop who murdered Anthony Lamar Smith in December 2011. Yet another pig has gotten away with cold-blooded murder of a Black man.

On Friday night, the police used pepper spray on protesters, arresting 33. The National Guard had been put on alert before the judge’s verdict was announced but were not called in. On Saturday, protesters mobilized for noisy marches through suburban malls chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “It’s our duty to fight for our freedom,” spreading the movement to wider communities. At one point the marchers were joined by Nick Cannon―rapper, actor, director, comedian, and television personality. And a mass rally was held Saturday night. On Sunday, 1,000 people mobilized in front of the St. Louis Police Department, lined up in rows from block to block, and then held a die-in. From there they went to Saint Louis University and marched through the campus.

The police have gotten more vicious each night as protesters have refused to go home, or to let up. On Sunday evening 123 people were arrested after the police claim they ignored an order to disperse. The police used a technique called “kettling,” blocking exits and arresting people en masse. Dozens of residents, journalists, legal observers and protesters trying to leave were arrested. One of the reporters arrested said he was pepper sprayed in the face while a pig’s foot held his head to ground.

The police were recorded on social media that night, perversely using a chant stolen from the protesters: “Whose streets, OUR streets.” Following the mass arrests, the St. Louis police chief reiterated the message his goons had just delivered, making clear who really has state power under this system: “The city of St. Louis is safe and the police own the night…. We're in control. This is our city and we're going to protect it."

This is what “justice” looks like in the eyes of this utterly unjust system in AmeriKKKa!

On Monday morning, Black and white students at three high schools in the area walked out to hold protest rallies to condemn the verdict. Later on, 1,000 people gathered outside the St. Louis jail where people had been arrested the night before. Activists had been raising money and working all day to get them out. Hundreds stayed out there at the jail in support Monday night in the rain. 

St. Louis is just 10 miles away from Ferguson, where Michael Brown’s murder by police in 2014 was met by an uprising of the people who refused to back down, sending shock waves around the country and beyond. This and the rebellions following other police murders have forced people of all nationalities to face the ugly reality that when police murder Black, Latino, Native American, and other oppressed people, they are doing their job—and that’s why they are almost never punished.

A professor from Washington University in St. Louis, in a piece at CNN.com, wrote: “The pain and grievances of so many lost since Michael Brown has me and others like me, who didn't protest Ferguson, in the streets. I didn't speak out back then, but this time—after the acquittal in the death of Anthony Lamar Smith—I join others in protesting in support of our shared humanity.”

A woman who took part in a silent march of 100 to City Hall on Monday morning, led by clergy and political leaders, told NPR in St. Louis that she didn’t protest after Michael Brown’s death, but now her six-year-old daughter goes to an African-American school and she sees things differently. “I'm acutely aware of our white privilege every day and I need to put that to work. I need to do better for my kids. I'm afraid of institutional racism; I'm afraid of them having their black friends killed on the streets.” A group of four women on the same march carried signs saying “White moms for black lives.”

The Cold-Blooded, Premeditated Execution of Anthony Lamar Smith

Anthony Lamar Smith was approached by two pigs who claimed they had seen a “drug deal.” Smith took off in his car and the pigs chased him down. Along the way, Stockley told his partner: “I’m going to kill this motherfucker, don’t you know it!” One minute later Smith was murdered. The pigs slammed into Smith’s car, Stockley got out, walked right up to the car, and fired five shots through the driver’s window into Anthony Lamar Smith. One of them—the “kill shot”—was fired from six inches away. This was a police execution.

Stockley was not done yet. When he discovered that Smith had no gun, he did what cops do all the time: He went to his pig car; dug through his duffle bag for a “throw-down” gun; and planted that gun in the car next to the body. All of this evidence was recorded and is available online, including the fact that the weapon had none of Anthony’s DNA on it—but it did have the DNA of the pig!

In a sign of how blatant this murder was, five days before the verdict, the Ethical Society of Police, an organization of “officers of color” in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, issued a video statement of their findings that called for Stockley to be convicted. “He wasn’t defending himself in the line of duty,” said the Society's president. This statement was issued jointly with the President of the National Coalition of Law Enforcement Officers for Justice, Reform and Accountability.

But none of this mattered to the judge. In fact, in the court ruling he wrote, “Finally, the Court observes, based on its nearly thirty years on the bench, that an urban heroin dealer not in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly.” Here the judge violated his own rule of law: claiming that regardless of the facts in this case, that the only gun found in this murder had been planted by the cop, it could be assumed that this “urban heroin dealer” was armed.

Why does this happen over and over and over again? Because, as Bob Avakian, the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, says in 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.”

Enough with this system that needs to have pigs gun down Black and Brown people by the hundreds each year. Enough with police getting away with murder!

 

 

 

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