On Feb. 6, around 1,000 community members gathered to protest the vicious police murder of 18-year-old Ramarley Graham. He was shot at close range in his bathroom after being chased by police officers from an alleged drug deal.
The NYPD is claiming that Graham did not reveal if he had a weapon after police demanded he show his hands. The official NYPD narrative fails to mention the surveillance video that captures Graham walking calmly into the home and seconds later NYPD officers with no search warrant agressively trying to force their way in the home. They finally broke in through the first floor apartment. Police found no weapon — only a bag of marijuana in the toilet next to the body of the victom.
The rally denounced the violence of the NYPD in Black and Latino communities. As the rally first began, two squad cars passed by and many began to chant, “Murderers!” and “NYPD: KKK!” Some stood defiantly in front of the police cars.
The NYPD would like to portray such incidents as isolated tragedies, but the affected communities know different. In 2011, the NYPD documented over 700,000 stop-and-frisks and Graham was the third Black man killed by the NYPD in one week’s time. Across the country, the capitalist machine deploys an army of police to harass, intimidate and incarcerate our brothers and sisters in Black, Latino and other poor communities.
We cannot expect the courts and “internal investigations” to deliver justice, since these institutions are rigged to protect the police—just as they protect those troops who have murdered civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will take a powerful in-the-streets movement to push back the NYPD offensive in poor and working-class communities.
