Just Released Video
2015 Police Execution of Mentally Ill, Legally-Blind Man
January 21, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
On November 15, 2015, James Hill, a 47-year-old mentally ill and legally blind man, was shot and killed at a convenience market by police in Southern California. In a graphic video released this week, it shows five Fontana pigs with guns drawn and a dog entering the store after Hill had entered. They corner him in the back of the store, and as he crouches and cowers at a counter, they blow him away. The pigs’ original story is that Hill came at them with a knife, but the video clearly shows that Hill, who was yards away from any of these lying, murdering pigs, was not threatening any of them.
Fontana is located 50 miles east of Los Angeles and at one time had one of the largest steel mills in the country. The majority of the over 200,000 population of the city is non-white.
Attorney Mark Geragos, who is representing Hill’s relatives, said, “The video puts the lie to the obviously falsified police account of what happened. In fact, this was an execution.”
The Los Angeles Times reported that “An LAPD study released last year found that more than a third of the people shot by Los Angeles police in 2015 had documented signs of mental illness.”
Gunning down a mentally ill, legally blind person is a totally illegitimate use of force. In a quote from his book BAsics, Bob Avakian addresses the 1998 Riverside, California, police murder of Tyisha Miller, a 19-year-old Black woman. Miller was passed out in a car, as a result of a seizure, when the police claimed she woke up and had a gun; the cops fired 23 times, hitting her at least 12 times:
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
Stop Police Terror!
Stop Police Brutality!
Stop Police Murders!
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.