Carl Dix on “Reasonable Demands” When It Comes to Stopping Police Murder
September 7, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Carl Dix is a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and a co-initiator of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network. For the full speech, click here. For video of the full August 27, 2015 event, see stopmassincarceration.net.
This is an excerpt from a speech given August 27, 2015.
Let me start out by getting personal. When I tell you the police have killed over 700 people so far this year, these are not just statistics to me. In the decades I’ve been working to stop murder by police I’ve seen the devastation killer cops inflict on families and on communities. I met Mertilla Jones five years ago. It was just days after a SWAT team broke into the wrong house and murdered her seven-year-old granddaughter, Aiyana Stanley-Jones. I met Juanita Young 15 years ago, just days after a cop, who had arrested her son Malcolm Ferguson the previous week for protesting the police murder of Amadou Diallo, murdered Malcolm. I met Nicholas Heyward almost 20 years ago, two years after his 13-year-old son, Nicholas Jr. was gunned down by a cop while he was playing with a toy gun. These are just a few of the thousands of people who have been murdered by police. Ask these parents what it’s like to mourn your child, without even justice. Or ask my wife, whose brother was shot down by cops right in front of his mother, just a day after they had told her they were gonna kill him. All this is a big part of why I’m doing all I can to mobilize people to act to STOP police getting away with murder. And it’s why you need to join with this effort.
People who front for this system are asking, “What are your demands?” They say, “You can’t just tell us to stop letting our cops kill you, you have to have some ‘reasonable’ demands.”
It tells you something about this system that to them stopping the police from murdering innocent people and terrorizing Black and other oppressed peoples is “unreasonable.” Let’s leave that aside for now. OK, here are some demands.
How about indicting, convicting, and putting the killer cops in jail? And I don’t just mean the ones who get caught on video killing someone next week. I mean all the killer cops, including those who have killed thousands of people over the past years and decades. This is a “reasonable” demand because there is no statute of limitations on murder!
How about dismantling the new Jim Crow of mass incarceration and the whole genocidal program this concentrates? Don’t be bragging about how Obama pardoned 46 people when there are 2.3 million people locked down. How about doing something about this for real?
How about dropping the charges on everybody who got arrested protesting murder by police over the past year?
How about shutting down that dungeon and butcher shop they got over there on Rikers Island, and the other dungeons just like it in other cities?
And we do have an overarching demand: How about you STOP unleashing your cops to kill our people?
These are pretty reasonable demands, unless you are presiding over a system that NEEDS official murder, terror and massive, unjust imprisonment. These are the demands that people need to throw down over and fight for as part of ending these horrors. And Rise Up October, the big national march in New York City on October 24, is aimed at making a big leap in the fight to do this.
When you’re up against a genocide—and that IS what we’re dealing with—you don’t ask the people presiding over it to make some changes to smooth out the rough edges of that genocide or to slow down its intensity. You act to stop it.
And when you’re up against a genocide, you don’t listen when they say: “You’ve made your point—now you can stop disrupting the business as usual of our system.” We haven’t “made our point” until all of society is in an uproar saying that THIS MUST STOP. We haven’t made our point until everyone has felt compelled to choose sides on this because they understand that there is no middle ground, and people feel challenged to be in the street saying THIS MUST STOP. We haven’t made our point until, like Rev. McCorry says, these so-called champions of human rights stand revealed before the whole wide world for the frauds that they are, and the whole world sees that THIS MUST STOP.
THIS is why we have to be out there on October 22, 23, and 24.
FIGHT THE POWER, AND TRANSFORM THE PEOPLE, FOR REVOLUTION
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.
