Pigs Kill Two Teenagers in Two Weeks
Chicago Police Answer To Youth Killing Each Other: "Out Of The Way, Let US Do It!"
June 9, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The violence carried out by the Black and Latino youth of Chicago against each other is a terrible scourge. In response, the mayor has expanded the police force, and these pigs are doing what they were set up to do: repress and murder the very youth whom they claim to be protecting.
On Friday evening, June 2, Chicago police murdered Corsean Lewis, a 17-year-old boy, in the Washington Park neighborhood on the South Side. According to news accounts, Corsean was standing with a group of people in an alley a few blocks from his house, and when an unmarked squad car turned into the alley, police allege that Corsean “fired a round,” striking the front bumper of the car. Police then opened fire on the group in the alley, and Corsean was shot multiple times.
Police said a weapon was recovered from the scene, but Corsean’s uncle said Corsean did not have a gun on him. Google the phrase “A handgun was found at the scene” or “gun recovered at the scene.” You get pages of hits. Many show a pattern: the common nationwide police practice of planting weapons to justify their murders of people.
After Corsean’s murder, dozens of squad cars descended on the area and rifle-toting police pushed bystanders away, taping off the area and terrorizing the neighbors.
The police were working as part of the Chicago Police Department’s new summer mobile patrol unit that was rolled out in late May. It is one of the first murders since CPD unveiled its new use of force policy in May. Supposedly, deadly force can be used when there is a threat of great bodily harm or death. By early June, the summer mobile unit, which is supposed to patrol the beaches and parks, has been unleashed on oppressed communities and has already been responsible for at least three shootings of people across the city.
About 24 hours after shooting Corsean, officers working a similar summer mobile unit farther south in the 8100 block of South Maryland Avenue were involved in another shooting. A man had run from officers who had seen him drinking outside. He went into a nearby apartment building, where police claim there was a struggle over a gun. A pig was shot in the hand, and his partner shot at the man, critically wounding him. The man was trying to get away from the pigs who were harassing him for supposedly drinking and running away!
Other Recent Murders by Police in Chicago
May 17: Rashad Wells Jr., 17 years old
On May 17, an off-duty Cook County sheriff fatally shot 17-year-old Rashad Wells Jr. inside a hair salon in the Englewood neighborhood in the South Side Chicago. The justification for murder: the police claimed they caught the youth in the act of robbing the salon.
The Wells family lives in the neighborhood and relatives and friends gathered outside the salon and yelled at police and reporters—for telling lies, for leaving the body on the ground, for having shot the boy in the first place, for locking up Black men but not white men.
“He's very familiar with the neighborhood, and just the idea of him robbing his neighbor when he's, when everyone knows him, is cause for speculation, for pause,” said Eric Russell, Tree of Life Justice League of Illinois.
The police made no claim that Wells was armed.
May 13: Tywon Salters, 21 years old
A SWAT team killed Salters inside an area hospital. At the time Salters was in the custody of the Cook County Jail on a charge of vehicle theft and was under guard and being treated at the hospital. Witnesses said that at one point he was seen running through the hospital naked. The police at the time claimed he had somehow managed to disarm the corrections officer assigned to guard him, and then taken one and then another nurse hostage. The SWAT team went into a room where he had gone with one of the nurses and killed him and injured the nurse, claiming that negotiations had “broke down.”
It later came out that Salters was on suicide watch and earlier had been treated for ingesting a cleaning fluid. The day the SWAT team killed him, he was in the hospital because doctors had to surgically remove a piece of a plastic jail-issued sandal that he apparently ate. It also later came to light that the guard had removed Salters' shackles and fled after Salters managed to get his weapon and took the two nurses hostage.
Salters might be alive today if he could have gotten appropriate mental health treatment, and if the police had acted in any kind of human way, including if the SWAT team’s job included real training in handling this kind of situation. But under the normal workings of this system that is not going to happen.
April 3: Jack Burris, 66 years old
Burris was killed, not by a police bullet, but by a police vehicle. On the late evening of April 3, a Chicago police SUV slammed into his Honda coupe in an intersection in the Roseland neighborhood on the far South Side of Chicago. A witness said the police SUV blew a stop sign and was going 80 mph and the siren came on only just as they blew the light. Police claimed that the officers were responding to a call of shots fired. As if that justified ramming into Burris’s vehicle and killing him!
This was no “tragic accident.” Clamping down on the Black community is what these pigs do, even if it means killing a man on the way to doing that.
Earlier Murders by Police in Chicago
February 15: Chad Robertson, 25 years old
Have we heard this before? Unarmed Black man shot in the back and killed for the crime of running away from the cops. Chad Robertson was on a stopover in Union Station, waiting for a bus to Minneapolis when he was approached by Amtrak officer LaRoyce Tankson. Even according to official statements, Robertson took off running and was no threat. No witnesses saw Robertson with a weapon that night. By some accounts Robertson was at least 70 feet away when the officer took a crouching stance and cold-bloodedly shot him in the back. Robertson was taken to the hospital and later died of his wounds.
This was so outrageous that the authorities were forced to charge Tankson with first degree murder. Tankson’s lawyer told a judge that the officer feared for his life after Robertson turned toward him and pulled something from his pocket.
Robertson’s sister Nina Robertson responded with this: “How many times are they going to keep being able to do this to us? How many times are they going to keep saying that that was why they're killing us? It's wrong.”
Robertson's family said they plan to be at all of Tankson's court appearances until they get justice. They are still waiting.
February 10: Michele Robey, 55 years old
This system murders the mentally ill. This reality got played out again when 55-year-old Michele Robey was gunned down by Chicago police on February 10 of this year. They found her in the street with a knife in her hand. They tased her twice. That didn’t work. So they shot her.
Afterwards, as she lay on the ground dying, one of the cops cold-heartedly told her, “You should have dropped the knife. An ambulance is coming now.”
Did they give her space and talk her down? NO.
Did they bring in trained mental health people? NO.
Did they try to disarm her by putting themselves in harm’s way and doing everything possible not to harm her? NO.
Michele was a mother, with a master’s degree in psychology. She had worked in medical research. Her family says she first showed signs of mental illness in 2009 and was diagnosed with bipolar schizoaffective disorder. She had lost her job, her home, and been forced to file for bankruptcy.
This system has no real answer for the plight of the mentally ill like Michele Robey. And having psychiatric problems can be a death sentence.
* * *
This list of those killed by the police in Chicago in recent months brought home two things:
The truth of what Bob Avakian says about the role of the police:
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. (BAsics 1:24)
And the second, that things don’t have to be this way.
This summer the Revolution Club of Chicago is working in these very neighborhoods where the pigs carried out these murders to call on the youth to get out of the violence against each other the only way possible: by directing their anger, creativity and courage against the system responsible for keeping oppressed people down and divided against each other. As part of that, the Club leads people to righteously stand up against the police terror that enforces that system.
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