Police Murder Must STOP!
ST. LOUIS COP KILLS ANOTHER BLACK YOUTH
by Carl Dix | October 9, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
A white off duty St. Louis cop gunned down Vonderrit Myers Jr., an 18-year-old Black man, last night. One day short of 2 months after the police murder of Michael Brown, another Black life is stolen. THESE POLICE MURDERS MUST STOP, and it's up to us to stop them.
The police say that Myers and several friends ran when the off duty cop tried to make “a pedestrian stop” on them and that Myers shot at the cop first. So, according to them, the 17 shots the cop fired were in self-defense. Witnesses to the incident say Myers was unarmed, that he had just bought a sandwich and that’s all he had in his hands when he was chased and gunned down. People gathered at the scene of the murder to protest it within minutes and soon the crowd had grown to several hundred angry people. A resident whose son had been with Myers on Wednesday night said, "They have been harassing him all day like they do all the time, pulling him over, stopping him." "That's how it is. They harass the kids in the neighborhood. Our kids walk around in their own neighborhood and get harassed for it." This is the reality of life in this country for Black people. It has become a daily fact of life that Black youth have to fear for their lives, and face the danger of summary execution by police at any time, for doing anything, or nothing.
Why does an off-duty cop feel like he can be making “pedestrian stops” of Black youth while he's moonlighting as a security guard? This killing and the story the police are using to justify it reflect how Black people are criminalized in this society. Some Black youth walking together are suspicious and need to be jacked up by a cop, even if the cop is off duty. This is like the Black Codes that southern states, including Missouri, enforced during the days of slavery which gave whites the power to break up any gatherings of 3 or more Black people. And it brings to mind the 1857 Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court which said that Black people had no rights that white people are bound to respect.
THIS SHIT MUST BE STOPPED, AND IT'S UP TO US TO STOP IT.
This police terror concentrates an overall program of suppression, a program that includes warehousing more than 2.2 million people in prison, subjecting tens of thousands of these people to the torture of long-term solitary confinement and treating the youth like criminals, guilty until proven innocent, if they can survive to prove their innocence. This program has genocidal implications, and it must be STOPPED!
Things don't have to be this way. Thru revolution, communist revolution, we could end these and all the other horrors this system enforces on people here and around the world. We have the leadership needed to make this kind of revolution in Bob Avakian (BA), the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party. And we are building a movement for revolution and building the party as its leading core. Get with this movement for revolution.
And right now we need massive resistance to these horrors. Everybody who hates the fact that in this country the color of a person's skin determines whether someone lives and how they live needs to come together to say NO MORE to police murder, NO MORE to mass incarceration and all the other abuses of the criminal “injustice” system in this country.
Many people who suffer this abuse are beginning to stand up and resist This resistance must continue and grow. All those who don't suffer this abuse, but who don't want to live in a society where these horrors are the daily lot for tens of millions of people need to join in the resistance.
And now is the time. Get ready to take to the streets on October 22, the National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation. Go to the web site stopmassincarceration.net/, find out what's being planned for October 22 in your area and mobilize people to come out to the demonstration. If nothing's happening in your area, then organize something.
This is not time to be talking about gradually reducing how many people are in prison or appealing to the federal Department of Justice to oversee brutal, murdering cops. A big STOP SIGN to police terror, mass incarceration and all their consequences must be put right in the face of U.S. society, and it needs to be done NOW! Not some time off in the future, but RIGHT NOW!
October is the time to make a big leap in doing this, and you need to be part of doing that. Let's make October a month of the kind of resistance that can be the beginning of the end for mass incarceration in this country.
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