Revolution #241, July 31, 2011
Chicago Police on a Murderous Rampage: 42 people shot in 2011
We Say NO MORE!
Revolution received the following statement from the Chicago branch of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.
The Chicago police have shot 42 people this year, almost double the rate of 2010, and brutalized many more. Chicago – home of the first Black president – is gunning down Black and minority youth in the streets. Chicago – host in May 2012 of world leaders for the G8 and NATO – is gunning down Black youth in the streets. The police chief justifies this by painting the victims as thugs who “pull out guns and shoot at police officers... with wanton disregard.” This is a bald-faced lie to cover up the extreme brutality and murder of an occupying army let loose on communities of the oppressed. Look at two of the most recent police shootings:
 Jimmell Cannon |
Jimmell Cannon is 13 years old. He just finished 6th grade. You couldn’t ask for a nicer kid. One of his teachers told the Chicago Sun Times: “He’s a doll. This is a kid who made more improvements in one year than any other student.” (7/27/11) On July 26, Jimmell was with family and friends at a birthday party at a west side park when the police rolled up, claiming to respond to “shots being fired in the area.” The police claimed that Jimmell ran and aimed a BB gun at them so they shot him 8 times! These cowards shot a child 8 times!
Eyewitnesses said Jimmell never had a BB gun. Plus 2 of the shots hit Jimmell’s open hands – one ripping through his palm, the other blowing off a finger – something that could only happen if his hands were in the air as eyewitnesses said. Additional shots tore through his body, including his buttock, which could only happen if his back was turned – hardly a position from which he would have been threatening the police. The evidence completely contradicts the cop’s story. 13 years old! Who indeed is shooting with “wanton disregard”? The police!
Three hours earlier on the west side, the police claim that they stopped Joe Banks, 21, and he pulled a gun, so they shot him. Again, nothing but lies. Witnesses tell of cops swarming into the neighborhood. All of a sudden they took out after Joe, who didn’t seem to even realize that the cops were after him because he was just trotting along holding up his pants. Witnesses say a cop coasted up on his bicycle behind Joe, pulled out a gun and shot him in the back, barely missing his heart. Cops cuffed him and jumped on his back so hard that they broke 2 of his ribs. There was no gun. The cops then beat and arrested 3 of Joe’s family for daring to yell that the police had “done wrong”!
These are not exceptions. Woodlawn, June 2011: JonRynn Avery bled to death in his own bathroom after the police chased him through the plate glass front door of his house. Englewood, June 2011: Flint Farmer was killed in a hail of police bullets; they claimed his cell phone was a gun. The list goes on over the years and across the country. Thousands of stolen lives.
We say NO MORE! “No more generations of our youth, here and all around the world, whose life is over, whose fate has been sealed, who have been condemned to an early death or a life of misery and brutality, whom the system has destined for oppression and oblivion even before they are born. I say no more of that.” (BAsics 1:13 by Bob Avakian, leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party). |
People are angry. Many ask why are the police shooting our young people down like animals in the streets? And why are the police never indicted, convicted, and jailed for these crimes?
“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.” BAsics 1:24
IT IS TIME FOR US TO WAKE UP. The days when this system can just keep on doing what it does to people, here and all over the world ... when people are not inspired and organized to stand up against these outrages and to build up the strength to put an end to this madness .... those days must be GONE. And they CAN be. |
No more stolen lives!
- Demand justice for all those murdered, shot and brutalized by the police.
- Expose the police lies and call out their murdering ways.
- Take our determination to the streets - enough is enough!
- Reach out to many other people who could be won to stand with the people, if they knew the truth.
- Build a powerful October 22, National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation.
Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution.
This System Has No Future for the Youth. The Revolution Does!
Get connected with the revolution:
Get organized for the time when we can sweep away this system once and for all. We have a strategy and the leadership. Read and spread the Message and Call from the Revolutionary Communist Party, “The Revolution We Need ... The Leadership We Have.” Read, spread, post Revolution newspaper (revcom.us). Get the book with the essentials of revolution, BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian.
Revolutionary Communist Party, Chicago branch
c/o Revolution Books, 1103 N. Ashland, Chicago, 773-489-0930, revbookschi@yahoo.com
Revolution newspaper: revcom.us
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