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

Last weekend, memorials for George Floyd were held in several parts of Houston, where Floyd grew up. Meanwhile across the Houston area, and across the country, murders by cop continued. According to Mapping Police Violence, the number of people killed by police in Harris County (which includes Houston, the largest city in the county) rose from 17 in 2019 to 24 in 2024.

In Houston, six people were killed in eight days in May:

• May 15—Houston Police Department (HPD) pigs killed a man they claimed “wielded a knife” and lunged at them. A police spokesman told a reporter that the cops were “were trying to aid someone who was actively in crisis and unfortunately, it escalated so quick they were not able to even talk to him.” In other words, HPD encountered someone they said was suicidal, and shot and killed him within seconds of the encounter. Then they justified it.
• May 16—Ernest Duke Harrison, 33 years old, was gunned down in the Museum District by police who said he “matched the… description” of a suspected robber. They claim Harrison held a machete, which “prompted the officers to shoot.”
• May 17—An unnamed man at the scene of a minor car collision in North Houston was gunned down by at least two, possibly more, cops who said he “appeared intoxicated” and pulled out their weapons.
• May 22—Two people were killed in a police car chase. One of them was a man who, even according to police, was in no way connected with the alleged cause of the chase. The other man, who was being pursued by police, supposedly killed himself in his car as firefighters were trying to get him out.
• May 23—An unnamed Spanish-speaking man was shot and killed by cops who claim he carried a chunk of concrete and threatened them with it. HPD Assistant Chief Yasar Bashir said the police “have a very difficult job… when we encounter somebody with weapons… threatening the officers.”

These murders were barely mentioned in the local media. Most of the victims remained nameless, as far as the general public goes. But it seems that all the dead were Black or Latino. HPD is not releasing body cam videos of any of the incidents until at least 30 days after each death, following department policy. By then the body count will almost surely have grown higher.

As Bob Avakian said in 2012, after the murder of 18-year-old Ramarley Graham by New York City cops, 

How many more times does this have to happen? How many more times do the tears and the cries of anguish and anger have to pour forth from the wounded hearts of people?! How many more times, when another of these outrageous murders is perpetrated by the police, do we have to hear those words that pour gasoline on the already burning wounds: “justifiable homicide, justified use of force” by police?! How many more?! 

The system of capitalism-imperialism these pigs enforce must be overthrown, as soon as possible.