Should "officers of the law" shoot into a crowd of people for an alleged $2.90 fare evasion? NO! But that's just what New York City pigs did on September 15. Derrell Mickles, a 37-year-old Black man who was reportedly under “emotional distress,” was followed by cops after jumping a subway turnstile at the Sutter Avenue station on the L line in Brooklyn. When the train car pulled into the station, Mickles was shot by the pigs in a hail of bullets that not only seriously wounded him but hit two bystanders, as well as one of the cops. Mickles was shot in the abdomen. A 49-year-old bystander who was shot in the head underwent cranial surgery and has brain damage; the other bystander is a woman shot in the leg.
The pigs claim that Mickles pulled a knife (which was legal for him to carry) and told the police not to follow him. But they couldn’t let another “fare evader” get away, could they? The two cops followed Mickles up three flights of stairs to the subway platform. The pigs said that Derrell made a “lunging” motion toward the police who at first tased him, and when that didn’t work, they opened fire.
When Derrell was hospitalized, his mother, Gloria Holloway, was prevented from seeing her son because he was “in custody.” And the NYPD hadn’t even told her that her son had been shot—she found that out through a reporter who came to interview her.
Derrell Mickles was arraigned from his hospital bed on a number of charges including attempted assault on a police officer, criminal possession of a weapon, menacing, and fare evasion. He hasn’t been able to walk since being shot by the police. The attempted assault charge alone carries a prison sentence of seven to 20 years. Bail was set astronomically high. Mickles’s lawyer described him as “a man without substantial means,” most recently working as a chef at the U.S. Open. So far, no charges are being filed against the gunslinging pigs who fired without any regard for human life.
There’s evidence that the pigs are covering up their shootings. At one point, the police said that they had recovered a knife at the scene and posted a photo of it on social media. But later they admitted that the knife they found was not Mickles's knife and that someone had taken it from the scene. The police finally released some body cam footage of the confrontation a few days later. It shows that at the exact time when the police opened fire, Derrell was standing motionless on the platform between the two cops, with his hands by his sides and his back to a train. The attorney for the bystander who was shot in the head told reporters, “The NYPD’s version of events is a gross mischaracterization of what we see on that video.”
On September 17, 18 people were arrested during a protest against this latest wanton police shooting, mainly for “disorderly conduct.” According to CBS News, “They jumped the subway turnstiles to bring attention to what they say was a reckless reaction by the NYPD for shooting a man over doing the same thing.” One protester told CBS, "Two dollars and 90 cents is not [worth] a bullet shot to the head." In another protest the following day, protesters jumped turnstiles at the West 4th Street station in Greenwich Village.
The police shooting of Derrell Mickles and the bystanders reminds me of a powerful statement by the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian about the murder of Tyisha Miller—a 19-year-old Black woman killed by Riverside, California, police in 1998. Miller was 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. In speaking to this, Bob Avakian said:
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