Stephon Clark & Alton Sterling & Saheed Vassell:
Police Murder, System Cover Ups & What Must Be Done Now!

by Carl Dix

Updated April 5, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

* March 18: Stephon Clark—gunned down by two Sacramento, California cops who shot him eight times in his grandmother’s backyard; six times in the back, once in the side and once as or after he was falling down, according to an autopsy done by the young Black man’s family.

* March 27: The Louisiana attorney general announced that the cops who murdered Alton Sterling would face no charges. The federal Department of Justice had already announced it would press no charges in this case. After these murdering pigs were allowed to go free, a video that had never been shown to the public was released, showing the pigs cursing, tasing and threatening to kill Sterling from the moment they arrived on the scene. Then they wrestled him to the ground, started yelling “gun” and shot him to death.

* April 4: Police shoot down unarmed Saheed Vassell in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Saheed was unarmed, mentally ill, and well-known throughout the neighborhood—including by police. According to witnesses, he was shot dead in a hail of bullets within 30 seconds of police arriving on the scene. All this on the exact day of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King!

These horrors put out there for all to see the fact that police continue to inflict wanton murder and brutality on Black people. Police continue to kill more than 1,000 people each year, and hundreds of those killed by police each year are unarmed and doing nothing wrong when they were killed. And the brutal, murdering pigs are almost never punished in any way for the horrors they enforce on so many people.

Those courageously standing up against all this in Sacramento—and now in Brooklyn—are RIGHT to do so. This system has proven, again and again, that it places no value on Black lives and the ONLY chance of justice comes through ferocious struggle. Shout outs to the folks in Sacramento who took over the interstate highway and twice shut down the entrance to the basketball arena, to the NBA players who put Stephon Clark’s name on their jerseys and paid for his funeral, to Stephon’s brother and the other people who disrupted the meeting the city authorities held to appear that they “felt the pain” of the protesters while insisting they wait for the process to play out.

We need this and more in the streets of Brooklyn now—and all across this nation.

We’ve gone through this for decades—those in power telling us to wait for the results of investigations, investigations that almost always let the murdering pigs walk free. We went thru it with Obama sometimes shedding crocodile tears over the deaths of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice. And still the murdering pigs walked free. This is what played out with the murder of Alton Sterling, and the same thing will continue to play out unless people rise up mightily—joining with those who are courageously standing up and taking this even further.

And now those in power aren’t even pretending they care. Trump has vowed to “take the gloves off the police,” and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has pulled the Department of Justice back from even questioning abusive police practices. This will give even more freedom to brutal, murdering police to inflict horrors on Black people and others. We got a glimpse of what that will mean when a Sacramento sheriff’s car did a hit-and-run on a 61-year-old protester, who said afterward: “If I’d done that, hit someone and not stopped, I’d be arrested.”

It is always wrong to stand aside when injustice is being perpetrated against anyone. And it would be especially wrong to stand aside now as the fascist Trump/Pence regime intensifies the terror police bring down on Black people as part of hammering fascist rule into place, a rule that includes ethnic cleansing of immigrants, assaults on the lives of women and LBGTQ people, accelerated destruction of the environment and potentially a nuclear holocaust against the people of the world.

All this poses two challenges to everyone who has an ounce of justice in their hearts:

1) To those still on the sidelines—Get into the streets! Are you willing to wait for the results of an official investigation, an investigation that almost always amounts to a cover up? Are you somebody who would express more outrage if the police were getting away with shooting down dogs than you do when they do this to Black people? WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? Where’s your outrage, where’s your humanity? This IS your fight—join in now.

2) To those out in the streets and everyone else—Get to the root of the problem and get into the real revolution, which is the only way to end this horror show for real. And get with the leader we have for this revolution in Bob Avakian (BA), who has forged a new communism which points the way out of the madness of today. BA sees not just the blood-soaked horror that Amerikkka has always meant for Black people, but also how the struggle against this horror can and must play a critical role in breaking all the chains that bind humanity:

There is the potential for something of unprecedented beauty to arise out of unspeakable ugliness: Black people playing a crucial role in putting an end, at long last, to this system which has, for so long, not just exploited but dehumanized, terrorized and tormented them in a thousand ways—putting an end to this in the only way it can be done—by fighting to emancipate humanity, to put an end to the long night in which human society has been divided into masters and slaves, and the masses of humanity have been lashed, beaten, raped, slaughtered, shackled and shrouded in ignorance and misery.
―Bob Avakian

We cannot continue to live this way, and we don’t have to. There is another way. An important part of getting out of this madness means taking this fight against murder by police even higher, and joining the movement to drive the fascist Trump/Pence regime from power before they are allowed to consolidate their fascist rule. And doing all this while digging into and getting organized for an actual revolution.

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