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Louisiana Attorney General Rules:

Pigs Who Murdered Alton Sterling Will Face No Charges

March 27, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Video of police murder of Alton Sterling

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

Jeff Landry, attorney general of Louisiana, announced on Tuesday, March 27 that the two Baton Rouge pigs who shot and killed Alton Sterling on July 5, 2016, will face no charges. This is an unbearable outrage. There needs to be Justice for Alton Sterling!

Millions of people saw videos and TV reports of the Baton Rouge Police Department murdering Alton. They shot him six times at point-blank range, three in the chest and three in the back. Now, almost 21 months later, the state of Louisiana’s top “law enforcement official” declared that he “cannot proceed with the prosecution” because the police were making “a lawful arrest… based on probable cause.”

What does the legal system of this country consider “probable cause” for a cop to kill a Black man? Alton Sterling was in the parking lot of a convenience store where he often came to sell DVDs to provide for his family and himself. Shortly after the murder, the store owner told Revolution what he witnessed: “It was after midnight. I saw two cops pulling into the parking lot ... two cop cars. Well I decided to see what was going on. When I got out there they were already slamming Mr. Sterling on the car. They tasered him, tackled him onto another vehicle, and then that’s when it escalated to the officer shooting him.”

People in Baton Rouge Stand Up

The blatant, racist injustice of Alton Sterling’s murder by cop galvanized thousands of people in Baton Rouge. Protest in various forms continued for a month. In the first days after the murder, people held impromptu rallies in front of the Triple S store and marched through the largely Black north side. Youth and others continued to gather nightly at the store, often numbering in the hundreds.

Other youth began taking over streets outside the Baton Rouge PD headquarters, and at a convention center on the banks of the Mississippi. Cultural events protesting the murder were held at Louisiana State University, and thousands of people—mainly middle class people, Black and white—marched to the state capitol. A memorial service for Alton in the basketball arena of Southern University, a historically Black college, drew thousands.

Police retaliated with threats and violence, especially against the youth. Hundreds were arrested. A lawsuit against the BRPD described how police continued to swarm, beat, and arrest people as they “proceeded down France Street towards East Boulevard in line formation across the road, with the armored vehicle, assault rifles, rubber bullet guns, gas masks, shields up, and what appeared to be a ‘long range acoustic device (“LRAD”),’ which creates a painfully loud transmission.”

A System of Injustice

In May 2017, the Federal Department on IN-justice (DOJ) gave its stamp of approval to the police murder of Alton Sterling. The DOJ ruled that the police acted “reasonably” and “legally” brought no federal charges against the killer. Now the state of Louisiana has essentially ruled the same.

Think about this, and what it tells you about the system we live under. The pigs who murdered Alton Sterling claim he had a gun. One of them was sitting on him, his right hand was visible; clearly he was not holding a weapon when they murdered him.

At a vigil for Alton held at the convenience store Tuesday night after the Louisiana attorney general’s announcement, one participant posted on Facebook, “Baton Rouge, and the city of blood. They can kill us and it’s just ok with them.”

It’s not just Baton Rouge, it’s this entire country. Police wantonly and brazenly murder, and it is upheld by every level of legal review. This happens again, and again, and again. Alton Sterling. Philando Castile. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Carlos Mejia. The painful list goes on and on—and it must STOP! Over and over, local, state, and federal courts have ruled that all murdering cops have to do is claim they “felt threatened”—and they are unlikely to even be charged, much less convicted. These murders are part of the constant terror carried out by the police against Black, Brown, and other oppressed people.

A system that does this over and over again is criminal, immoral and illegitimate. We need an actual revolution to overthrowthis system of capitalism-imperialism and bring into being a radically different society.

STOP—GENOCIDAL PERSECUTION, MASS INCARCERATION, POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER OF BLACK AND BROWN PEOPLE!