“If a person is running away, there is no reason to chase them, hunt them down like an animal and shoot and kill them”

—Paula McGowan, whose son Ronell Foster, father of two, was murdered while fleeing a cop in Vallejo, California, who had stopped him for riding his bike without a light.

Not only have this country's pigs murdered over 1,000 people each year since 2015, findings based on research by Mapping Police Violence (MPV) show that nearly one-third of those killed in each of those years were running or driving away from the pigs when they were killed.

Two such killings happened in just the past month. In Akron, Ohio, June 27, pigs chased and shot unarmed Jayland Walker over 60 times after a “traffic stop.” On July 4, a San Bernardino, California, pig got out of an unmarked car, immediately pulled his gun, and shot Robert Adams as he ran in the opposite direction.

Over 2,500 people have been murdered by police while fleeing since 2015, practically one killing every day, according to Mapping Police Violence findings. One-third of those killed while fleeing from cops were Black people, even though they make up only 13 percent of the population.

The lives of the people killed by police were stolen from loving parents and children, brothers and sisters, close partners, husbands, wives, and friends. Just in 2021:

• 13-year-old Adam Toledo, killed on March 29, 2021. Chicago pigs chased Adam, ordered him to stop and show his hands. Video shows him stopping and raising his hands as a cop shoots him to death.

• 20-year-old Daunte Wright was stopped by cops in a Minneapolis suburb on April 11 for having an air freshener on his rearview mirror. A short time later Daunte was dead, the pig who shot him claimed she thought she had pulled a Taser, not a gun.

• 42-year-old Andrew Brown Jr., murdered in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Pigs stopped Brown to deliver an arrest warrant for selling drugs, started blasting away as he sat with his hands on the steering wheel of his car, and then fired a fatal shot to the back of Brown’s head as he tried to flee for his life.

• 8-year-old Fanta Bility, Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania. Cops fired at a car outside a high school football game because they mistakenly thought someone in the car fired at them. The pigs shot four bystanders--Fanta was killed, and her sister and two others were wounded.

Despite the mass protests and increased public outrage in recent years at the epidemic of police murder, pigs are no more being held accountable for their crimes than in the past. Over the past seven years, only 50 cases out of 2,500 people killed while fleeing have resulted in criminal charges. And only nine pigs have been convicted. Civil suits in some cases award millions of dollars to the families of their murdered loved ones, as though that will shut them up.

To actually bring an end to murder and brutality by pigs, it’s going to take an actual revolution to put an end to the system that needs police terror. As Bob Avakian has put it:

This revolution must be actively, consciously, scientifically worked for. And a big part of this is fighting back now against institutionalized white supremacy and police terror, as well as the other ways that this system oppresses, degrades, and slaughters masses of people, in every part of the world, while plundering the environment—building these struggles as powerfully as possible, linking them together on the basis of the recognition that they all have a common source in this system of capitalism-imperialism, and building up the basis to bring down this system through an actual revolution. (From “Police and Prisons: Reformist Illusions and the Revolutionary Solution,” by Bob Avakian)