A Madison police officer puts a man on the ground, surrounded, and shoots him dead in the street—not far from the apartment where police killed 19-year-old Tony Robinson eleven years ago. A few days later and a thousand miles south, Austin police corner a 17-year-old Black teen on a playground—a playground—and when he lifts his shirt and reached into his waistband, they open fire. No firearm was found—only a water bottle. The police chief's own explanation is that this may have been "suicide by police": that this teenager may have wanted to die, and that the system's answer to a young man’s despair was to grant his death wish with bullets.

The history of this country is full of horrific stories like this, and worse. This country is bound up, from its very beginnings, with the systematic brutality and murderous oppression of Black people. As we will get into later, terror and murder of Black people is integral to, and required by, the rulers of this system of capitalism-imperialism to exercise their rule. This week saw two more egregious demonstrations of that. It is way past time to say: Enough is enough! And act to finally put an end to it.

Madison, WI

On Wednesday afternoon, July 22, Madison, WI pigs chased and captured 38-year-old Corey Ruiz, a Black man, and then just seconds later gunned him down in the middle of the street. The pigs claim they were responding to reports that someone was stealing bicycles and trying to enter unlocked vehicles in the Marquette neighborhood. When they got to the neighborhood, Corey rode off on a bike, but then he fell, and four pigs jumped him. 

Since none of the pigs were wearing body cameras, they may have thought they were in the clear. But someone nearby captured the murder on their cell phone, and it quickly made it onto the internet.¹ You see three pigs grabbing Corey, and a fourth use a taser on him. Corey fell to the ground with three pigs holding him, one stomping on his ankles. Someone yells “knife.” The fourth pig, who claims they were injured, pulled their gun and fired three shots at point blank range. 

Corey's 13-year-old daughter, Kah’liyah Aliomar, cried when she spoke of her father at a press conference Friday night. ““He’s my twin for life. I wish I could see him one more time. I wish he could tell me he loved me one more time.” Her mother described Corey as “a lyricist. He was a poet. He was an artist. He was very kind and he was extremely funny.” But in the eyes of these armed enforcers of this system, he was just another Black man.

A friend of Corey said he'd known him since high school, described him as a “good guy” who was always willing to help him out. He was always just a phone call away, very down to earth.” And then he added: “I was not shocked to hear that the police had shot a Black man. Every day I fear for my life when I walk out the house.” 

The man who took the video told Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) he didn't know the details of what led to the encounter. "But from where I was standing 10 feet away, that looked an awful lot like an execution to me." Yet another police "execution of a Black man," in broad daylight, with numerous witnesses. 

Hundreds of protesters converged at the scene and marched to the Wisconsin State Capitol. Since Corey's murder, community members have been holding a vigil around the intersection where he was shot. By Saturday, July 25, the pavement was filled with chalk writing, signs, flowers and candles. Tents, foldable chairs, fires, a portable toilet and a few mattresses have been blocking the intersection. 

This is not the first murder by Madison pigs. In 2015, Tony Robinson, Jr., an unarmed, biracial 19-year-old, was killed by a pig within blocks of this killing. There were major protests, but no charges were ever brought against the killers. 

Even deeper in people's memory, Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back, right in front of his kids, in 2020 by a Kenosha, WI pig. Blake survived the shooting, but he was paralyzed for life from the legs down and suffered other damage as well. And Jacob Blake was never even charged with any crime from the encounter. Massive protests broke out. This is where the white vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse carried out, and was acquitted of, the shooting of three protesters, two of whom died. As we wrote at the time, “The System 'Works'… to Enforce White Supremacy.”²

Police Killing in Austin, TX

Less than two days later, Austin, TX cops, following up on a 911 call at 3 am, went to a park in the middle of the night and, less than a minute after spotting a 17-year-old Black youth, opened fire with a barrage of bullets. The youth, identified by police as Anthoniel Williams, was unarmed. But that hasn't stopped these pigs from blaming the youth for his own death! 

The pigs released a body cam video within hours of the killing. At their press conference, they played the 911 call, which they learned was made from the victim's own phone. They showed their bodycam video, with the pigs yelling at Anthoniel to put his arms up. At one point, Anthoniel lifts his shirt and begins to pull a water bottle from his waistband. "Certain he was reaching for a gun," they unloaded with rounds and rounds of shots, while yelling at him to stop moving. Anthoniel died on the spot. 

Before they could do any investigation, these pigs have absolved themselves from any wrongdoing for gunning down an unarmed youth. How many times have we seen pigs get away with murdering someone because they thought he had a weapon. And in this case, the "weapon"—a water bottle—was still in Anthoniel's waistband! Ignoring any other possible explanations, this time they are claiming that the victim wanted the pigs to kill him! And they even have a name for this lunacy: “suicide by cop”! We note that there has been no evidence that the victim didn’t call to report someone else with a gun—but rather than investigate, these pigs saw a Black youth and fired away. 

Lessons from the "Beautiful Uprising" after the 2020 Murder of George Floyd

Bob Avakian (BA), the revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, called the 2020 protests a beautiful uprising, and it was—millions of people of all backgrounds and ethnicities, defying armed fascist thugs and militarized police, refusing any longer to accept that this is simply how things are. He spoke to something crucial in the middle of it: that the uprising was posing, for millions, the biggest questions about what kind of world people are willing to live in and fight for.

But the answer requires a scientific summation that a lot of people don't want to hear. Those leading the Black Lives Matter movement led people to take up what might seem to be obvious “radical” demands such as: "defund the police" and "abolish the police." BA was direct about this—that under this system with its systemic inequality that discards Black and Brown youth, defunding the police is not possible. These demands leave untouched the actual source of the horror—the capitalist system which has, from America’s birth, had the oppression of Black people woven into its foundation. And it cannot be ended within it. Six years on, that summation has been proven in the grimmest way possible: police still kill over a thousand people a year in this country. Nothing about the fundamental relationship between this system and Black people has improved. In fact, things have gone backward. Some police departments got body cameras, some slogans got adopted by city councils and then quietly abandoned. And the machine kept running, because the demand was never aimed at the machine—it was aimed at a piece of its budget, or its name, or individuals within it, while capitalism-imperialism, the actual system generating this horror, was left completely intact.

This has to be said plainly: the demands of “defund” and “abolish” were dead ends. Not because the people who took them up were foolish or insincere—the opposite; people were and are deadly serious, willing to face down tear gas and rubber bullets for what they believed in. But because those demands could not make this system into what it is not, could not have stopped what happened in Madison or Austin this week. And the self-appointed so-called “BIPOC leaders”³ of that time channeled people’s hopes and desires for a radically different world into such demands. And this left millions of caring young people demoralized and questioning whether their protest was worth it.

The impact of these dead ends continues to keep people away from the real, revolutionary solution. Look at what's actually on offer after Madison and Austin. A "community listening session," to be scheduled soon. A promise that body cameras might be in next year's budget. Two "concurrent investigations" in Austin—one criminal, one administrative—that will take months and will very likely conclude, as they overwhelmingly do, that the shooting was justified. Democratic gubernatorial candidates issuing statements of concern. A police chief expressing her "heartfelt sympathies" to a family whose son she will not identify, over a killing she will not yet explain.

And in what passes for the “left” in this country right now, the danger is different but just as real: the impulse to reach immediately for the next reform demand—better training, an elected review board, a use-of-force policy revision, defund-the-police 2.0—because it feels like something, feels achievable, feels like a concrete ask you can rally around. But mistaking reforms for a real solution, an actual revolution, is exactly how righteous fury gets metabolized and neutralized, year after year, killing after killing. Every one of these channels has to be sharply and openly demarcated from what's actually needed. Because failing to do this guarantees the same outcome: exhaustion, a slow ebbing of the struggle, and the machinery running over people again—with a new name attached. And now, with the rapidly consolidating of Trump/MAGA fascism, with the conditions for Black people, as well as for other people of color, immigrants, and women, getting worse by the day, we cannot afford to cling onto old or new illusions.

Why Are These Murders by Police "Necessary" For THIS System—And Why A Radically Different World Without Such Murder Is Both Necessary... And Possible

It needs to be said clearly: outrage is necessary but it is not sufficient, and neither is moral condemnation, however righteous. What is needed is a scientific understanding of why this keeps happening—and the new communism developed by Bob Avakian insists on exactly that: objective truth, dialectical materialist analysis, not "your truth" or "my truth," not identity standing in for understanding, but a rigorous look at what this system actually is, how it actually functions, and what would actually have to change to end this.

The first question that should be confronting every decent person is: Why do these police murders go on, and on, and on? And digging deeper: Why are these murders by police necessary for this racist, oppressive system to ensure its “order” and its ongoing functioning. 

The reality is that from the beginning of this country, white supremacy has been poured into the foundation and built into the institutions and the ongoing functioning of this system. From nearly 250 years of slavery, followed by 80+ years of Jim Crow segregation and Ku Klux Klan terror, and even through the courageous battle for Black people's most basic civil/human rights in the 1950s and 1960s, while the forms of this racist oppression have changed, the majority of Black people are forced to endure oppression, degradation, mass incarceration—and never-ending murder by the enforcers of this historic crime. This includes the terrible reality that for masses of Black people in the inner cities, there is nothing for them in the formal economy, forcing them into informal, illegal ways to survive. And what does this system do with youth that have no future and no prospects? It contains them violently. 

This system has no answers to this racist oppression because it is built into its foundation and ongoing functioning. Every institution—from employment, to education, to access to needed medical care, to a place to live, to the legal system—white supremacy treats Black people and other people of color as second class citizens if not worse. Even if this ruling class wanted to put an end to it, which they don't, those in their millions who benefit from this white supremacy—which includes the core of that “other country” which worships Trump—will fight to save their perceived privilege. They believe that Trump's open promotion of white supremacy, male supremacy, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and the rest, are “Making America Great Again.”

Understood scientifically, the police murder of Black people in this country is more than just one of the endless outrages generated by this system. It is one of the "Five Stops"—a sharp concentration of a major social contradiction, alongside the oppression of women and LGBTQ people, the ravaging of the environment, the terrorizing of immigrants, and the wars and occupations carried out by U.S. imperialism around the world. These are called "stops"—as in, what needs to be stopped—because each one represents a contradiction this system generates and cannot resolve in the interests of the people living under it. Not "won't." Cannot.

More than ever, there needs to be ferocious, growing struggle against these police murders, and all of these atrocities pouring forth from this fascist regime. But this fight has to be fought as part of creating conditions for the actual revolution that will make it possible to, at long last, truly put end to this centuries-long nightmare and bring something truly liberating into being. As we are living in what BA has referred to as a rare time, when the deepening crises of this system—the rulers of this system sharply divided, the consolidation of fascism, the danger of world war between nuclear powers, the mounting environmental catastrophe—are opening up the possibility of actual revolution in a way that hasn't existed for decades. That possibility does not arrive automatically, and it does not last indefinitely. Either people rise to what this moment actually makes possible, and forge something genuinely different—a new socialist society, on the road to a communist world without the exploitation and oppression this system depends on—or humanity gets forced backward into something even worse than what already exists, with more Madisons, more Austins, and worse still to come.

The task in front of all who want fundamental change—revolution—is not to manufacture the gut-wrenching feeling that millions experience seeing another Black person executed by police. It's already there. The task is joining with it, and training people to take up the actual scientific method and understanding of why it keeps happening and what it would really take to end it.

There needs to be ferocious struggle, including with those who hate what is happening but are clinging to, and being misled by, “community” leaders pushing the bullshit that this regime is reformable—now focused on voting. Which means staying within the same system out of which this fascism grew. No! People have to break with all of these dead-end paths that lead right back into the system by taking up the fight for an actual revolution—guided by the leadership of Bob Avakian, and learn about the framework for a totally new society in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which he has authored. 

Yes, a whole other world is possible and badly, urgently needed—but it is up to us to bring it about.