It Now Comes Out...
Vallejo Pigs Fired 55 Shots in 3.5 Seconds When They Murdered Willie McCoy—and They Call It “Reasonable”!
| revcom.us
Fifty-five shots! That’s how many times the pigs in the California city of Vallejo fired at Willie McCoy when they murdered the 20-year-old Black man on February 9. Even one lethal shot fired by the cops at the young man passed out or sleeping in his car would have been totally unjustified. But 55 bullets—in less than four seconds?! This makes it even more clear: Willie McCoy was the victim of a cold-blooded execution at the hands of the system’s police.
Willie McCoyThe revelation about the 55 rounds fired (it was known that 25 bullets had struck Willie, shattering his body) came in a report by an “outside expert”—a consultant who is an ex-cop—hired by the city of Vallejo, which was just released. The report came to a different conclusion about the police killing of Willie McCoy—do we even need to spell out what it was?
The ex-cop wrote, “I opine the 55 rounds fired by 6 officers in ~3.5 seconds is reasonable based upon my training and experience as a range instructor as well as through applied human factors psychology.” Reasonable?? Let’s go back to the night of Willie McCoy’s murder. It was Saturday night, and Willie was slumped over in his car in the drive-through lane of a Taco Bell. Then someone called 911. Six pigs showed up, and after yelling some commands, they began firing. They would later claim they saw a handgun in Willie’s lap and his hand moving. His cousin said, after seeing police video footage of the shooting, “They killed him in his sleep. He scratched his arm in his sleep ... and they murdered him. There is no justification.”
And the “applied human factors psychology” b.s. is nothing but the outrageous justification pigs use over and over again when they murder somebody—they “feared for their lives” so they had to blast away with their guns. A justification accepted by police chiefs, police review boards, and the courts time and time again, as the murdering pigs are allowed to walk.
This ex-cop is the same “expert” who determined that cops in Sacramento did not violate any laws when they gunned down Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old Black man, in March 2018. Stephon was standing, unarmed, in his grandmother’s backyard, with his back to the cops, who fired 20 times. In March of this year, the district attorney refused to bring any charges against the two cops who killed Stephon, ruling (as reported by the New York Times) that “police officers are legally justified in using deadly force ‘if the officer honestly and reasonably believes’ he is in danger of death or injury.”
How many more times will police get away with murder because they “feared for their lives”?
As we said shortly after the pigs murdered Willie McCoy:
The execution of Willie McCoy is part of a raging epidemic of police murder taking place across this country. This remains a continuing and horrific epidemic of needless deaths of mainly Black and Brown youth at the hands of the police, even if it is not in the news, or there is far too little mass protest and resistance demanding it STOP!!
White supremacy and the vicious oppression of Black and other oppressed peoples—from the nightmare of slavery... to the horrors of lynching and Jim Crow... to the epidemic of racism, mass incarceration, and police brutality, terror and murder today—are woven into the very fabric of this capitalist-imperialist system. This system cannot be reformed. It can and must be overthrown—through an actual revolution. The time to be working toward that revolution is NOW!
HOW LONG MUST THIS GO ON!?
HOW MANY MORE WILL BE MURDERED BY POLICE BEFORE THIS ENDS!?
THIS IS INTOLERABLE AND UNACCEPTABLE, AND IT MUST STOP!
THIS SYSTEM CANNOT BE REFORMED, IT MUST BE OVERTHROWN!
“How Long?! How Many More Times Do The Tears Have To Flow?”
A clip from BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!, a film of a talk by Bob Avakian given in 2012. Watch the whole talk at revolutiontalk.net.
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.
—Bob Avakian, BAsics 2:16
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