Over a thousand people are killed by the police each year.

And decade after decade, the murdering police literally get away with murder almost all the time.

This will continue as long as this system is allowed to continue, until this system is done away with by a real revolution. Capitalism-imperialism needs its armed enforcers to prop up and protect this oppressive system—to keep the people down, to repress the people who face tremendous injustice, suffering and inequality. As the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian has said:

The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness. (BAsics 1:24)

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The October 22nd Coalition Interim National Coordinating Committee put out a call for protests this year which said in part:

The mission of the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation is to mobilize those directly under the gun of police terror, alongside those who are relatively immune to state violence, to derail the atrocities of police brutality, mass incarceration, and political repression. Since 1996, this has been realized through organizing for a National Day of Protest every year on October 22nd.

In a time when we are witnessing a sharp return to open white supremacy, and a fascist movement both inside and outside of government, the Coalition is building a network to respond quickly across the country through protests and other actions, strengthening people’s ability to resist, and creating better conditions for fundamental social change.

The call from the October 22nd Coalition speaks to the horrific, ongoing epidemic of police murder in the United States. 

As of September 15, 2023, there have been 8,784 fatal police shootings since 2015. And over the years the number of murders by police per year has only gone up. In 2022, the police killed 1,251 people. As of the end of August, the police had killed 30 more people compared to the same period in 2022. The police take the life of at least THREE PEOPLE A DAY.

Now, with three more months left in 2023, the police have already killed 920 people.

Think about this: So far in 2023, there have only been 13 days when the police did not kill someone in the United States.

And what does it say about Amerikkka: That Black people are 2.9 times more likely to be killed by police than white people in the U.S. Although half of the people shot and killed by police are white, Black people in America are shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for roughly 14 percent of the U.S. population and are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans. Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and Latinos are also killed by police at disproportionate rates.

The slaughter continues.  A few egregious examples from just the last couple of months: 

August 24, 2023:  Video released by the Blendon Township, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, shows the police murder of Ta’Kiya Young, a 21-year-old pregnant Black woman. The pigs shot into Young’s car in the parking lot of a supermarket. Young was an aspiring social worker and mother of two boys, ages 6 and 3. A store employee told the police Young had stolen bottles of alcohol. The pigs walked up to Young sitting in a car and said, “They said you stole stuff—do not leave.” After Young says she did not steal anything a confrontation breaks out and a second pig draws his gun from in front of the car. The pigs claim Young drove forward and the cop fired into the windshield, killing Young. 

September 6, 2023: Dhal Apet, 17, and Lueth Mo, 15, who were part of the South Sudanese community in Syracuse, were shot and killed by an Onondaga County sheriff’s deputy. The pig said he was responding to a call of suspicious activity and were investigating reports of two stolen cars and a burglary. The pig claims the car carrying the two teens drove towards him and he shot into the car three times as it sped away. The two young men were found nearby, one already dead, the other dying. The pigs said this was a case of self-defense. But released security footage shows the deputy ramming the car and easily evading it before shooting and killing the two young men.

October 16, 2023: After serving more than 16 years in prison for armed robbery, 53-year-old Leonard Cure was found innocent and released. After such an injustice Cure should have been able to live out the rest of his life with some peace. But instead he was murdered by a pig serving the same system that had unjustly put him in prison for so many years. Cure was stopped by a sheriff’s deputy for speeding. It should have ended with a traffic ticket being issued. Instead, in less than three minutes, Cure had been shot dead by the pig sheriff. 

And again, and again, and again: The murdering police get off almost all of the time.

If you take the years between 2005 and 2020, at the going rate of more than 1,000 people killed by the police each year, this means at least 15,000 people were killed by the police in this time period. And with all these murders, only 64 have resulted in a pig being arrested and convicted. This is 0.1 percent. (statista.com) In other words—the pigs get away with murder 99.9 percent of the time! Two recent examples:

September 26, 2023: A judge dismissed all charges against a Philadelphia pig who fatally shot 27-year-old Eddie Irizarry on August 14. Body cam footage shows the cop shooting Irizarry six times at point-blank range. The pig was initially charged with first-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, aggravated assault, simple assault, possession of an instrument of crime, reckless endangerment of another person and official oppression. Now all these charges have been dismissed. 

October 12, 2023: In the murder of Elijah McClain, a Colorado jury issued a split decision, convicting only one pig of criminally negligent homicide and assault, and acquitting the other. The jail time for this is at most one and one-third to four years. Elijah McClain, a massage therapist, was walking home from a convenience store in Aurora, Colorado on Aug. 24, 2019, when he was stopped by the cops. A 911 caller had described Mr. McClain as “sketchy.” In fact, what Mr. McClain was doing was waving his arms, dancing and wearing a mask. His mother said he did this because he was anemic and needed to stay warm. The pigs put McClain in a carotid chokehold and paramedics injected him with ketamine. Handcuffed and laying on the ground, McClain vomited and pleaded for his life, saying several times, “I can’t breathe.” McClain eventually suffered cardiac arrest and died in the hospital several days later.

Note: These are only a few recent examples from a long, long list of police murders and murdering pigs getting off. 

The police kill more than 1,000 people every year and only one percent of them are even arrested and convicted of anything. This system and its armed, murderous enforcers must be gotten rid of through a real revolution. In a new socialist society, the security forces will be completely different than the pigs in the system we are forced to live in now. As the statement, “We Need and We Demand A Whole New Way to Live, A Fundamentally Different System,” says:

The role of government institutions established with this new socialist Constitution, including the police and military, will no longer be to contain, control, repress, brutalize, murder and slaughter people, here and all over the world. Instead, these radically new institutions will safeguard the rights of the people and give backing to the masses of people in moving to abolish all forms of discrimination and inequality, all relations of oppression and exploitation. They will defend the new, emancipating society against attempts to sabotage, attack and destroy it, and will support people throughout the world fighting for the goal of emancipation.