Killer Police Still Running Rampant...
We Cannot and Must Not Let This Outrage Continue!
August 18, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
These are just three of many recent stories of people murdered by the police in U.S. cities.
Ramarley Graham, Bronx, New York
In February 2012, 18-year-old Ramarley Graham was killed by a cop who followed him into his home, pursued him to the bathroom, and shot him as his grandmother and a six-year-old brother watched in horror. After angry protests, a grand jury indicted the killer cop, Richard Haste, for manslaughter. But the judge threw out the indictment for procedural errors by the prosecutor during the grand jury hearing.
Now, adding outrage upon outrage upon outrage, a second grand jury has refused to indict Haste on any charges. Haste’s lawyer said, “I think the grand jury found there were many opportunities for Ramarley Graham to end the situation with no violence and no shooting, and he did not avail himself of those opportunities.” This is the same perverse genocidal logic behind the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin: when a Black youth is confronted by a cop (or a racist vigilante), the onus is on the youth to show why he shouldn’t be shot down right then and there. And if the pig or vigilante says they shot a Black youth because of a perceived “threat,” then that is reason enough to justify the killing.
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Hans Kevin Arellano, Santa Ana, California
On July 30, 22-year-old Hans Kevin Arellano was killed by a cop in the Southern California city of Santa Ana. A video taken by a bystander and aired on local TV shows the cop arriving at the shopping mall and getting out of the patrol car, gun drawn. The cop orders Arellano, who is in a juice shop, to get on the ground. Arellano, unarmed, starts to exit the shop. Just a few seconds later, a shot is heard, and Arellano, hit in the chest, collapses to the ground.
The Santa Ana police chief said that the police were called to the scene because of a report of “criminal activity”—and that Arellano was a “convicted burglar” and was “combative.” The video shows no physical confrontation between Arellano and the cop. So having a previous record and being verbally “combative” are grounds for being shot down by police acting as judge, jury, and executioner?!
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Israel Hernández-Llach, Miami, Florida
Israel Hernández-Llach was an 18-year-old award-winning artist—a sculptor, painter, photographer, and graffiti artist whose work, according to one account, was “inspired by his home country of Colombia and his adopted city, Miami.” On August 2, Hernández-Llach was spray-painting an abandoned building when he was chased down by cops, who Tasered him in the chest. One of his friends who was at the scene said five cops chased Hernández, who weighed less than 140 pounds, and then shoved him against a wall. The friend then saw the young man on the ground, with the cops standing around Hernández, exchanging high-fives. Hernández was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The police chief claimed that “The officers were forced to use the Taser to avoid a physical incident.” A whole posse of pigs chase down a youth for a “crime” that would’ve resulted at most in a citation. The pigs catch the youth and shoot him with a Taser gun, resulting in his death—and then claim that somehow this skinny youth represented a physical “threat” that justified the Tasering that ended in yet another young life brutally stolen, all his dreams and aspirations cruelly shattered.
We must STOP this intolerable outrage of police murder after murder of our youth!
Editor's note: Tyisha Miller was a 19-year-old African-American woman shot dead by Riverside, California police in 1998. Miller had been passed out in her car, resulting from a seizure, when police claimed that she suddenly awoke and had a gun; they fired 23 times at her, hitting her at least 12 times, and murdering her. Bob Avakian addressed this.
If you can't handle this situation differently than this, then get the fuck out of the way. Not only out of the way of this situation, but get off the earth. Get out of the way of the masses of people. Because, you know, we could have handled this situation any number of ways that would have resulted in a much better outcome. And frankly, if we had state power and we were faced with a similar situation, we would sooner have one of our own people's police killed than go wantonly murder one of the masses. That's what you're supposed to do if you're actually trying to be a servant of the people. You go there and you put your own life on the line, rather than just wantonly murder one of the people. Fuck all this "serve and protect" bullshit! If they were there to serve and protect, they would have found any way but the way they did it to handle this scene. They could have and would have found a solution that was much better than this. This is the way the proletariat, when it's been in power has handled—and would again handle—this kind
of thing, valuing the lives of the masses of people. As opposed to the bourgeoisie in power, where the role of their police is to terrorize the masses, including wantonly murdering them, murdering them without provocation, without necessity, because exactly the more arbitrary the terror is, the more broadly it affects the masses. And that's one of the reasons why they like to engage in, and have
as one of their main functions to engage in, wanton and arbitrary terror against the masses of people.
BAsics 2:16
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