Revolution #235, June 12, 2011
Stop the Occupation
No More Police Murders
No More Repression and Criminalization of Youth
We received this statement on May 31:
On May 18, Fletcher “Antoine” Jackson and his friend John Sloan, two young Black men, were murdered by the police in cold blood on Curran Street in the Fruitvale district of Oakland. The day after the latest gang injunction was passed, they were hunted down and killed like animals. The cops were shooting through people’s fences and into their houses where children were sleeping. John was shot through the head in someone’s front yard. Antoine was also shot, and the cops refused to do anything when someone asked them to stop the bleeding. Instead, the cops told the people: “go back in your house and turn out the lights,” while they were ‘high fiving’ and congratulating each other on the shooting—like it was a big party for them. Antoine died later.
The next night dozens of cop cars blocked both entrances to Cuthbert St. in the Fruitvale, not allowing residents in or out. No one could check on their loved ones and children. Snipers, heavily armed cops in camouflage, a 35-man SWAT team, DEA agents, military-style vehicles, and cop helicopters—all roaming the street and sky. For what? A raid on one—ONE—apartment that supposedly netted two guns and a knife.
The cops claim this is all about “taking weapons off the streets.” No—It’s about putting more weapons on the streets—their weapons! This is a military-style occupation, that echoes what the U.S. is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and many other countries. And right here in the USA it’s going on especially in Black and Latino neighborhoods. So who is really the world’s “Number One Terrorist”? The U.S. of A.!
What’s going on in Oakland is part of a nationwide epidemic of police brutality and murder. Just a year ago in Detroit, a 7-year-old girl, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, was killed when the police raided the wrong apartment. Not a single cop, not a single city official has yet been punished or reprimanded for this murder. Now, on June 1, Johannes Mehserle, the BART cop who murdered Oscar Grant, is appearing before a judge who will probably let him walk free after 7 months in prison.
It’s like Bob Avakian, the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, 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. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and order that enforces all this oppression and madness.” (BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian, RCP Publications)
Stop the Occupation – the Whole Damn System is Guilty!
Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution!
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