Any System That Would Send Its Cops to Pepper Spray and Brutalize a Nine-Year-Old Child for Being Upset Deserves to Be Brought Down at the Soonest Possible Time and Replaced with Something Far Better
Rochester, NY Pigs Again Horribly Brutalize a Black Person in a Mental Health Crisis
| revcom.us
For anyone with a heart, the January 29 video of cops brutalizing a 9-year-old Black child is gut wrenching.
You hear the cries, “I want my dad, I want my dad.”
Then the horrific inhumanity of Rochester, NY pigs. They hold the girl’s head against the snow-covered ground. She pleads with them, “Can you please get the snow off of me? It's cold." They handcuff her, grab her and try to shove her into the pig car.
One cop says, "You're acting like a child." And the girl responds, "I am a child!"
Another pig tells the girl, "This is your last chance, otherwise pepper spray's going in your eyeballs." The girl continues to resist saying, “You said you were gonna pepper spray me! No, please don’t!” She’s still screaming for her dad as they get her into the back of the cop car. "Just spray her at this point" a cop says. Then another cop yells “I’ve got her” and pepper sprays the girl.
Two of the pigs involved have been suspended with pay, another put on leave. But they haven’t been arrested and charged with child abuse and aggravated assault—which is what this was!
The cops had responded to a report of "family trouble" with six cop cars and nine pigs. They were told the girl was "suicidal" and had said, “she wanted to kill herself and her mom."
The cops uphold what they did, saying the girl was “agitated” and “refused to listen to them,” and had run away from home. By this pig logic, just about all kids at one time or another should be handcuffed and pepper sprayed.
Whether the situation involves an adult, teenager, or especially a young child, the appropriate response is to try and comfort and calm the person and figure out why they’re distraught—with compassion. And as anyone who has kids knows, they say all kinds of things when they get upset. You need to figure out whether they’re actually in danger of harming themselves or others and help them. NOT viciously assault them! In a revolutionary, humane society, when officials are called into such a situation, this is what would happen. But, the enforcers of this society are NOT capable of this.
This is the same pig department that last March murdered Daniel Prude, a Black man who was experiencing a mental health crisis—placing a hood over his head so he could not breathe and pressing his face into the pavement for two minutes.
This is the same system which considers so many Black people as less than human, to be kept down and suppressed. To be brutalized, even if you are a child, if you resist in any way—or for no reason at all. That has separated hundreds of children from their parents at the border.
Yet another reason to urgently prepare for and hasten the time when we can put an end to this utterly brutal and inhumane system.
Editor’s note: Tyisha Miller was a 19-year-old African-American woman shot dead by Riverside, California police in 1998. Miller had been passed out in her car, resulting from a seizure, when police claimed that she suddenly awoke and had a gun; they fired 23 times at her, hitting her at least 12 times, and murdering her. Bob Avakian addressed this.
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.
— Bob Avakian, BAsics 2:16
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