Albuquerque, New Mexico

The Police Murder of 19-Year-Old Mary Hawkes

May 5, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 


Mary Hawkes

In the early morning hours of April 22, 2014, the cops spotted 19-year-old Mary Hawkes. They say they “suspected her of stealing a truck” so they ran after her. Then they shot her dead. Later, the swift execution was justified with those words heard over and over again so many times, “the suspect had a gun.” A nearby neighbor told a reporter, "All I heard was the three gunshots and it turned quiet… I didn't hear no yelling, no nothing. I just heard a lot of cop cars coming."

Mary Hawkes is the third person in five weeks to be killed by the Albuquerque Police Department. The news reports of her murder, of course, as they always do, made a point about her so-called “troubled past”—as if being arrested for something like shoplifting or being homeless somehow justifies being shot down with no mercy.

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.

BAsics 2:16

On March 16, just over a month before Mary Hawkes was killed, the Albuquerque police fired six rounds from an assault rifle into 38-year-old James Boyd, a homeless camper. The murder, caught on police video, shows Boyd trying to surrender and a police dog being sicced on him after he was shot. The video went viral on YouTube, prompting widespread outrage and several protests in the streets of Albuquerque. A week later, the police shot and killed 30-year-old Alfred Redwine after a standoff.

Since 2010, 38 people have been shot by the APD, 24 have been killed. NONE of the officers involved in any of these shootings have faced criminal charges or, in most cases, any kind of internal reprimand.

This is just ONE of the many, many police departments all around the country that systematically and routinely brutalize and murder people, where there is a whole history of the police literally “getting away with murder” time after time.

Cop cars always have that slogan painted on them, “serve and protect.” But what do these pigs really “serve and protect”? It’s this whole system of oppression and exploitation that causes so much misery for the people day after day after day. It’s this system of capitalism that gives these enforcers badges and guns and the “right” to brutalize and murder people with impunity in order to maintain the status quo of this whole unjust set up.

 

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