On the cold-blooded police murder of Willie McCoy in Vallejo

This System Has No Future For Youth,
But The Revolution DOES

From the Revolution Club, SF Bay Area

February 21, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

“We are being targeted ... Police have a campaign of executing young black men who fit a certain profile. Willie dressed the part. He represents hip-hop music. They are profiled.”

—David Harrison, Willie McCoy’s cousin

This system has enslaved, brutalized, tortured, and betrayed Black people for 400 years! They have NEVER valued Black lives, except as labor to mercilessly exploit in building up the wealth of this country. And now, because this capitalist system has moved so much industrial work to places where they can pay people even less and make even more profit—and because Black people in racist America have always been last-hired and first-fired—this system has no jobs and no future for millions of people besides a jail cell or a police bullet. And they patrol whole neighborhoods like an occupying army, treating people like Willie McCoy as nothing but a “problem,” to be caged or killed off.

Willie McCoyThese pigs didn’t even think twice about walking up to Willie McCoy’s car while he was SLEEPING and pumping his body with 25 bullets! Same thing police did to Demouria Hogg when he was passed out in his car in Oakland in 2015. This was nothing but an execution, just like what they did to Oscar Grant, shooting him in the back while face down on the BART platform. Or when a Vallejo pig jumped up on the hood of Mario Romero’s car and blasted him through the windshield with 40 bullets (and even reloaded!), and then had the nerve to claim he “feared for his life.” And we could go on and on. If you “fit the profile,” as far as these pigs are concerned, you’re just a “thug” that deserves to die.

Here’s the basic truth about the police:

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 their brutality and murder, is the law and order that enforces all this oppression and madness.

Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:24

Listen to what he says—The police 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. Why are young people like Willie in the situation they’re in? Why was Willie struggling to get out of Vallejo, as his friends told us, and the poverty he grew up in? During World War 2, thousands of Black people fleeing lynch mob terror in the South and looking for a better life came to the Bay Area to work in the shipyards and other industries in places like Hunters Point, Oakland, Richmond, and Vallejo. Black people were exploited and discriminated against, paid less and working in more dangerous conditions than white workers, but at least they had jobs and could buy houses. At that time, the Mare Island naval shipyard in Vallejo employed almost 50,000 people. By 1996 the shipyard was completely closed down. Willie McCoy wasn’t even born yet.

After that, the Black unemployment rate shot up, and so did police terror, to the point where the small city of Vallejo now leads the whole Bay Area in per capita police shootings. Willie McCoy didn’t create this fucked up world, where you have to hustle just to survive, only to end up dead or in prison. He was born into it, and into the culture that this system created. As Tupac expressed it:

I’m tired of bein’ poor and even worse I’m black
My stomach hurts so I’m lookin’ for a purse to snatch
Cops give a damn about a negro
Pull the trigger kill a nigga he’s a hero
Give the crack to the kids who the hell cares
One less hungry mouth on the welfare
First ship ‘em dope and let ‘em deal to brothers
Give ‘em guns step back watch ‘em kill each other

And Vallejo is known for that culture, from Mac Dre and E-40 to the youth coming up today like Willie, who went by the rap name Willie Bo, and his group FBG. The good side of that culture is the rebelliousness, the fuck-the-police attitude. We saw that the other day when the Revolution Club joined Willie’s many friends and community in a righteous and defiant march from the Taco Bell where he was killed, walking right into the Target store chanting, “Say his name: Willie McCoy! Willie didn’t have to die, we all know the reason why: The whole damn system is GUILTY!” We need a lot more of that fighting spirit! And we have to struggle to transform it into revolutionary understanding, determination, and organization.

The bad side of the culture is the celebration of killing and dying over turf you don’t even own—which is what the system wants you to do—and the glorification of pimping, which is just a way of acting like a little slave master toward women. The revolution we need is not about “getting yours” on the backs of other people, or trying to “make it” in this fucked up system. Even if a few can make it that way, the system is set up so the masses of people can’t. And the nightmare of this system will go on and on, one stolen life, one hashtag, one Willie McCoy after another. The only way the masses of people can get free, is by OVERTHROWING the system that is the source of all this oppression.

As the leader of this revolution, Bob Avakian put it:

There is the potential for something of unprecedented beauty to arise out of unspeakable ugliness: Black people playing a crucial role in putting an end, at long last, to this system which has, for so long, not just exploited but dehumanized, terrorized and tormented them in a thousand ways—putting an end to this in the only way it can be done—by fighting to emancipate humanity, to put an end to the long night in which human society has been divided into masters and slaves, and the masses of humanity have been lashed, beaten, raped, slaughtered, shackled and shrouded in ignorance and misery.