There seems to be a right, and even an obligation to be ignorant in the imperialist countries. If you do not accept the official narrative about how great or free your country is, you're looked upon as crazy, ungrateful, seditious, and worse. Well motherfuckers, reality will not let you be ignorant for too long, if you dare to open your fucking eyes. Here we go again. Fuck the police.
Days and Nights of Protest After St. Louis Judge Acquits Pig Who Murdered
Days and Nights of Protest After St. Louis Judge Acquits Pig Who Murdered
Anthony Lamar Smith
THIS is What Justice Looks Like in America
September 17, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Sunday, September 17: For the third day and night in a row, a thousand or more protesters have taken to the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, furious and disgusted that Jason Stockley—the pig who murdered 24-year-old Anthony Lamar Smith in cold blood in 2011—was found “not guilty” after his trial before a JUDGE. People, young and old, of all nationalities, have been expressing their fury that yet another pig has gotten away with cold-blooded murder of a Black man. When hundreds refused to leave the streets Friday night, the police used pepper spray on protesters, arresting 33. The National Guard had been put on alert before the judge’s verdict was announced. This is what justice looks like in the eyes of this utterly unjust system!
On Saturday, protesters mobilized for noisy marches through suburban malls chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “It’s our duty to fight for our freedom,” spreading the movement to wider communities. At one point the marchers were joined by Nick Cannon―rapper, actor, director, comedian, and television personality. And a mass rally was held Saturday night. A Washington University professor told St. Louis Public Radio, “I’m honestly pissed off about everything right now. It keeps happening. People protest, but nothing changes.”
After most protesters left, the police ordered the rest to disperse, bringing in hundreds of riot-clad cops with armored vehicles. It was reported that as the demonstrators retreated, windows along one side of a two-block nightlife area were broken. To get a sense of the breadth of the outrage in St. Louis, someone cleaning up the glass from their shattered windows on Sunday told the Chicago Tribune he understood why people are angry; the justice system is broken. “I’m not saying this is the right way to fix it,” but “the window isn’t murdered. Nobody is going to have a funeral for the window. We can replace it.”
On Sunday, 1,000 people mobilized in front of the St. Louis Police Department, lined up in rows from block to block, and then held a die-in. From there they went to Saint Louis University and marched through the campus.
St. Louis is ten miles away from Ferguson, where Michael Brown’s murder in 2014 triggered an uprising of the people who refused to back down, sending shock waves around the country and beyond. This and the rebellions following other killings have forced people to face the ugly reality that when police murder Black, Latino, Native American, and other oppressed people they are doing their job—and that’s why they are almost never punished.
The Cold-Blooded, Premeditated Execution of Anthony Lamar Smith
Anthony Lamar Smith was approached by two pigs who claimed they had seen a “drug deal.” Smith took off in his car and the pigs chased him down. Along the way, Stockley told his partner: “I’m going to kill this motherfucker, don’t you know it!” One minute later Smith was murdered. The pigs slammed into Smith’s car, Stockley got out, walked right up to the car, and fired five shots through the driver’s window into Anthony Lamar Smith. One of them—the “kill shot”—was fired from six inches away. This was a police execution.
Stockley was not done yet. When he discovered that Smith had no gun, he did what cops do all the time: He went to his pig car; dug through his duffle bag for a “throw-down” gun; and planted that gun in the car next to the body. All of this evidence was recorded and is available online, including the fact that the weapon had none of Anthony’s DNA on it—but it did have the DNA of the pig!
In a sign of how blatant this murder was, five days before the verdict, the Ethical Society of Police, an organization of “officers of color” in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, issued a video statement of their findings that called for Stockley to be convicted. “He wasn’t defending himself in the line of duty,” said the Society's president. This statement was issued jointly with the President of the National Coalition of Law Enforcement Officers for Justice, Reform and Accountability.
But none of this mattered to the judge. In fact, in the court ruling he wrote, “Finally, the Court observes, based on its nearly thirty years on the bench, that an urban heroin dealer not in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly.” Here the judge violated his own rule of law: claiming that regardless of the facts in this case, that the only gun found in this murder had been planted by the cop, it could be assumed that this “urban heroin dealer” was armed.
Why does this happen over and over and over again? Because, as Bob Avakian, the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, says in BAsics 1:24: “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.”
Enough with this system that needs to have pigs gun down Black and Brown people by the hundreds each year. Enough with police getting away with murder!
Hundreds and hundreds of people marching in St. Louis Friday after the judge released his verdict.
