Baltimore Pigs Deliver On-the-Spot Death Sentence to Korryn Gaines
This Must STOP!
August 8, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Korryn Gaines.
Photo: Korryn Gaines/Facebook
What kind of a system murders people—especially Black and Brown people—over and over again in situations that could easily have been resolved without shooting someone dead?
On Monday, August 1, a team of Baltimore County cops went to 23-year-old Korryn Gaines’ apartment in suburban Baltimore to serve her and her boyfriend with petty warrants. Her boyfriend fled the apartment and was arrested for an assault charge. Korryn and her five-year-old son Kodi remained in the apartment and refused to answer the door. A pack of heavily armed cops kicked the door open, and a standoff began. This was all to serve a warrant for failing to show up in court involving a traffic stop back in March. Seven hours later the pigs rushed into the house, shot and murdered Korryn Gaines and shot and wounded her son Kodi.
Korryn Gaines’ live video on Facebook of this was widely viewed, until the police got Facebook to shut down her Facebook and Instagram accounts in the middle of the standoff. Stung by the recent live stream video of the police murder of Philando Castile in Minnesota—they did NOT want anyone to know what was happening and what they were doing. They did NOT want this cold-blooded murder to be seen live by thousands of people.
Police claim Korryn threatened them with a legally registered shotgun. But the fact is, these pigs illegally entered her apartment without her permission, and she loudly and firmly told them to leave. It is completely understandable for a Black person to fear for their life when they encounter the police—especially when the cops are heavily armed and kicking down their door! And simply being prepared to defend yourself does not constitute a reason for the police to murder you.
The police and their media mouthpieces have attempted to justify this cold-blooded murder, claiming Gaines was emotionally unstable, and generally defaming her character. On Friday night, August 5, 200 people attended a candlelight vigil where family and high school classmates spoke out, taking on these lies and slanders. As reported in the Baltimore Sun, Ryan Gaines, Korryn’s 26-year-old brother described his sister as “a headstrong woman who would fight battles even when it was clear she couldn’t win.” Gaines said he and his sister shared unpopular political beliefs and that whenever they witnessed injustice they felt compelled to object. He said, “We was passionate about what we believe in.” Korryn commented regularly on police brutality. In fact, just days before she was murdered, she posted a meme that read, “If You Think Murder Is The Only Crime That Carries A Death Sentence Think Again” with pictures of people killed during routine encounters with police. An outspoken voice against police murder and brutality has now been silenced by a police execution.
The police had seven hours to resolve this, and there were certainly many ways they could have handled it without killing Korryn Gaines or wounding her son. But as this system keeps making clear—when an incident involves the lives of Black and Latino people, they simply shoot to kill. They come for a fucking warrant on a traffic ticket and end up murdering a Black woman. And shooting and wounding a five-year-old!
In fact, as one relative recounted at the vigil, he and Korryn’s mother went to the scene to see her and try and resolve the situation peacefully. He said they were confident that if given a chance they would have been able to resolve the situation and that Korryn would be alive today. But what happened is that they were NOT allowed to see Korryn, and he said he was taken aside and questioned about his own political views and associations.
This is what Bob Avakian wrote about Tyisha Miller, 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:
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
Time's up for this illegitimate system! Time to get organized for an ACTUAL revolution!
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