From a reader:
Los Angeles Police Kill Another Unarmed, Homeless Black Man—“That’s It For This System”
May 7, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Brendon Glenn
The slow genocide of Black and Latino men in this country continued on Tuesday night, May 5th near Venice Beach, California when the LAPD shot and killed 29 year-old Brendon Glenn. Glenn, who goes by the street name of “Dizzle”, got into some sort of altercation with the cops on the street when he was shot. According to an article in the LA Times, it has not been determined how many shots were fired or how many cops fired their guns. This killing comes just two months after the murder of another unarmed, homeless Black man, Brother Africa, by the LAPD.
The LA Times reported that “By midmorning Wednesday, a small, angry crowd gathered near the yellow tape blocking” the area where Glenn was killed. People shouted at the cops, who were on the other side of the yellow tape. One person yelled out, “The police are mercenaries!” A young woman, who was friends with Dizzle, described him as a “man who was affectionate toward others.” He always called her “Sister,” and she said he “always said goodbye with a high five and by saying, ‘Loving you.’” She wrote a message on a towel and held it up facing the cops. The message stated, “No justice, no peace. We love & miss you Dizzle!.”
KTLA news reported that a local resident who knew Glenn said “Whatever reason that they had to shoot him, I don’t think it was justified because he wasn’t a confrontational human being by any means. He was definitely like a peacemaker.”
It was also reported by KTLA that Glenn, who had recently moved to the area from New York, regularly attended Teen Project’s the P.A.D., a Venice support center for homeless youth.
Venice Beach, like the “skid row” area where Brother Africa was murdered, are areas that are being gentrified and the cops in both areas regularly make sweeps on the homeless, confiscate their property, and intimidate them in a way that makes it very difficult for them to live in those areas.
These killings of unarmed homeless Black men by the LAPD are just plain murder. If the pigs can’t get the homeless off the streets one way then they’ll do another way by having them taken off in a body bag.
How many times do we have to quote Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, when he tells us that “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, 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 their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces this oppression and madness.”? (BAsics 1:24) How many times do we have to say that the cops use of force against the people is illegitimate? (see “Murder By Police Should Not Be Tolerated!”, a statement by Carl Dix, Revolution #368) How many more police murders before the thousands who were in the streets protesting the murder of Freddie Gray become millions in the street? How much more of this shit are we going to take before the millions of us act on while saying to the pigs and those who they really serve, “That’s it for this system: Three strikes and you’re out!”? (see “Three Strikes” by Bob Avakian.)
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