Pigs Murder Security Guard—for Being a Black Man with a Gun
| Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Sunday, November 11, 4 am: sheriffs responded to a call that shots had been fired at a local bar in Robbins, Illinois, just south of Chicago. When the cops arrived, 26-year-old Jemel Roberson, the bar’s armed security guard, was trying to subdue someone. A witness described what happened next: “Everybody was screaming out, ‘Security!’ He was a security guard… and they still did their job, and saw a Black man with a gun, and basically killed him.”
Roberson had asked some drunken men to leave the bar. But then one of them came back with a gun and started shooting, hitting several people. Roberson wrestled him to the ground, trying to prevent more people from getting hurt.
But all the cops saw was a Black man with a gun—and they fired and murdered in cold blood.
Roberson was a musician who played keyboard and drums at several Chicago-area churches. He and his partner have a 9-month-old son, and they were expecting another child. Roberson was also, ironically, planning to become a police officer.
Roberson is now one of at least 840 people in the U.S. who have been shot and killed by police so far in 2018 and one of at least 19 in Illinois. The Illinois State Police is “investigating” the shooting, but they already released a statement trying to justify the action of the pig who killed Roberson.
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. (Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:24)
“How Long?! How Many More Times Do The Tears Have To Flow?”
A clip from BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!, a film of a talk by Bob Avakian given in 2012. Watch the whole talk at revolutiontalk.net.
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