We Will Not Forget Philando Castile

Killer Cops Walk Again

Millions watched as Philando Castile bled to death last July, his body riddled with bullets fired into his car by a suburban Minneapolis cop. Castile’s girlfriend Diamond Reynolds, in the car with her daughter, courageously live-streamed the aftermath of the shooting. On June 16, a nearly all-white jury acquitted the killer cop, Jeronimo Yanez, of all charges. Only then was the long-suppressed dash cam video from the police car finally released. It shows Yanez opening fire on Castile through the driver’s window seconds after Castile had politely informed him that he had a gun, which he was licensed to carry. Castile was following the cop’s order to get his ID when Yanez fired off seven bullets. Castile’s last words were, referring to the gun, “I wasn’t reaching for it.”

As Castile’s mother Valerie put it in anguished rage after the verdict: “They murdered my motherfucking son with his seat belt on. So what does that say to you? Now they got free rein to keep killing us any kind of way they want to.” Within the same week as Yanez’s acquittal, another two cops on trial for killing black people also walked. The reason is simple. They are the everyday domestic armed thugs of the American capitalist order, which is rooted in the brutal exploitation of labor and the forcible segregation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of society. Like modern-day slave patrols, the cops are paid to terrorize and oppress. NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick posted a picture on Twitter of the virtually identical badges of Southern slave catchers and today’s police, with the apt comment, “Always remember who they are.”

Every black man, woman and child knows that any encounter with a cop is a potential death sentence. After Castile’s shooting, his girlfriend was handcuffed and put in the back of a cop car with her four-year-old daughter, who pleaded, “Mom, please stop saying cuss words and screaming because I don’t want you to get shooted.”

With the acquittal of Yanez, one can hear the echo of the infamous 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision declaring that black people “had no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” And when it comes to the application of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, the forces of “law and order” don’t even pretend that a black man might have the same rights as a white man to carry.

Yanez’s defense was that he “feared for his life.” In a country where to be black is to be branded as a dangerous criminal, this same racist alibi has been played over and over again in acquittals of police. The cop who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland claimed he feared for his life in the face of Rice’s pellet gun, as did the Oklahoma police officer who shot Terence Crutcher to death as he stood with hands above his head. When on June 18 Seattle cops shot and killed a pregnant black woman, Charleena Lyles, in her apartment in front of her children, they claimed that she was “threatening.”

Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Minneapolis in outrage over Yanez’s acquittal, and protests were held elsewhere in the country. The power of the working class must be mobilized in support of protests against racist cop terror. As we wrote following Castile’s killing in “Black People Under Siege” (WV No. 1093, 29 July 2016):

“A massive show of force based on the mobilization of labor against cop terror would strike some genuine ‘fear of god’ into the police and their capitalist masters. And it would drive home the point that the interests of the working class—white and black, immigrant and native-born—are inseparably linked to the defense of the ghettos and the fight for black freedom. But that means the workers must be mobilized independently of, and in opposition to, all the political parties and agencies of capitalist class rule.”

The power of labor is kept in check by the union misleaders, who support the very capitalist system that the cops “protect and serve” and push the lie that relief can be found in electing Democrats. Under eight years of a Democratic Commander-in-Chief, conditions for black and working people continued to worsen while cops wantonly gunned down black people on the streets. Some 1,100 people were killed by the cops in 2016 alone.

A school cafeteria worker, Castile was himself a member of the Teamsters, one of America’s biggest and potentially most powerful unions. Yet all his local union leaders could offer in their statement after he was gunned down were “thoughts and prayers.” No wonder—the Teamsters organize cops in Minnesota! It is a measure of the utter treachery of the labor tops that they embrace the murderous, racist, strikebreaking cops as “union brothers.” The key to unlocking the social power of the working class is the fight for a class-struggle leadership of labor forged in opposition to the capitalist state. Cops out of the unions!

The bitter truth is that the police cannot be held “accountable” and there will be no end to police terror under capitalism. Only when this brutal system is swept away through proletarian socialist revolution, only when the multiracial working class becomes the new ruling class will there be justice for the exploited and oppressed. The Spartacist League is dedicated to the fight to forge a revolutionary workers party—one that is 70 percent black and minority—committed to the struggle for a workers government. It took a bloody Civil War, the Second American Revolution, to destroy black chattel slavery. And it will take a third American revolution, a workers revolution, to end wage slavery and black oppression. For black liberation through socialist revolution!