Following the Execution of Deborah Danner:
NYPD Pigs Tase and Kill a Man with Learning Disabilities
November 4, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Ariel Galarza (Facebook)
Two weeks after the NYPD executed Deborah Danner, a 69-year-old Black woman who suffered from schizophrenia (see “Chronicles of a Police Murder Foretold: The NYPD Execution of Deborah Danner & the Sick System Behind It”), the murderers with badges struck again. Ariel Galarza, a 49-year-old man who had learning disabilities, died after being tased twice by cops at his apartment in the Bronx, the same NYC borough where Deborah Danner was killed.
As reported by the New York Daily News, Mildred Galarza said her brother Ariel “received disability payments and was never able to learn to write. He had a mild form of asthma and suffered a stroke earlier this year.” An upstairs neighbor said Ariel was “not an aggressive guy at all, he’s a real good man.” According to the neighbor, “He was real good with my son. My son called him ‘Big Buddy.’”
None of this mattered to the pigs who showed up at Ariel Galarza’s door in response to a 911 call about someone who supposedly had a knife and was yelling. All we know about what followed is that the police claim they had to use their taser when Galarza held up a glass bottle and again when he resisted being handcuffed... and that he ended up dead after suffering a heart attack from the electrical shock. The second stun gun blast was delivered directly on his body.
No one should take the pigs at their word, in this or any other instance. Over and over again, cops have justified cold-blooded murders by claiming they felt their lives were “in danger”—and over and over again, except in very rare circumstances, they walk away without even being charged with any crime, let alone convicted. Look at Michael Brown, shot down as he had his empty hands raised, by a cop who described him as a “demon.” Or Omar Abrego, an unarmed Mexican immigrant who was chased down and beaten to death by LA cops. Or the Tacoma police murder of Jacqueline Salyers, an unarmed 33-year-old Native American woman who had three kids and was pregnant at the time she was killed. The horrific list goes on and on. And the police are backed up by the laws of this system, which say that if the pigs have a “reasonable” belief that they are physically “threatened,” they are “justified” in using deadly force.
Even if Ariel Galarza, for whatever reason, was acting unusually and did have a bottle in his hand—why would that be any reason to blast him twice with high-voltage shocks from a taser, which is known to potentially cause serious injury and even death? Why do the police, in these types of situations, immediately resort to using violent force against the people—instead of talking to family and neighbors to learn more about what’s happening, and taking steps to resolve the situation without people getting hurt?
This isn’t about a need for more “training” of the police, better rules and regulations, body cameras to monitor cops’ actions, or any other such reforms. The reality is that when the police carry out wantonly brutal, murderous, terroristic acts against the people, and get away with it time after time, they are doing their job. Bob Avakian got to the heart of what the police are about when he said (in BAsics 1:24):
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.
People do not need to work for “better police” or more “oversight” of the cops or any other such harmful notions that will only help keep the police murders and brutality going on and on. What is needed is to demand that police murders and brutality must STOP, and to do this AS PART OF preparing for an actual revolution to overthrow the system behind these cops, at the soonest possible time. Everyone who hates the epidemic of murders by the police, and all the other crimes of this capitalist-imperialist system—get into this revolution NOW. Find out how here.
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.
