Fighting racist police terror: It’s a lifelong struggle

I was part of a group of 18 people who turned out to confront racist KKKop/Corrections Officer, murderer Dion Middleton, on November 16, as he appeared on murder charges for the racist killing of 18-year-old Raymond Chaluisant and then fleeing the scene this past July. The bosses’ court showed how afraid they are of working-class rebellion when court officers surrounded the family and supporters and warned us to stay away from Middleton as they prepared to escort him, flanked by armed bodyguards, into and later out of the courtroom. We barely contained our contempt.

We are working on an article for the next issue of CHALLENGE with an updated analysis of the case, but to provide some perspective, I thought to share some of my personal experience from a life of confronting KKKops.

My first experience with racist police terror came in 1986 in the middle of the Eleanor Bumpurs case, an elderly disabled Black woman who was gunned down (with a shotgun!) by KKKops in her own apartment. As a young man, I remember being stunned by the viciousness of the cops against a 67-year-old woman clearly in emotional distress. In the days before cell phone videos and social media, our main weapons of publicizing these cases were street protests, leaflets, and many copies of CHALLENGE.

But it was in 1992 when racist police terror became something personal. I came to know a young mother, María Salim, whose 14-year-old son, Eric Reyes, had just been executed by an off-duty KKKop William Proulx (I’ll never forget that name) in East Hartford, CT. The Salim family had moved there to attempt to escape the violence of life in the city of Hartford. Proulx stalked young Eric after the boy ran away from a juvenile detention center, executing him in a parking lot with his personal gun, and let him bleed to death on the ground.

I helped lead a yearlong campaign to bring Proulx to justice and expose the racist capitalist system that caused it. Hundreds of Eric’s neighbors signed a petition we distributed condemning the murder, and our demonstrations exposed the murder as an integral part of this racist capitalist system. We also tried to provide support, comfort, and friendship to a family whose lives had been shattered. When his mother sued the town, I witnessed the bosses’ racist state kick into high gear to stalk and torment Eric’s family.

They spread false pro-cop stories in the major press, staked out the family’s home, and followed his mother around town, even arresting her on trumped up charges. The capitalist state made life hell for the family and left a lifelong trauma that haunts them to this day.

20 years later I was personally involved in another campaign against a racist KKKop shooting when the 20-year-old brother of the former student council president at the school where I taught was murdered by KKKop Ramysh Bangali as he was fleeing an armed robbery in the Bronx. Instead of protecting Reynaldo from the criminals, police gunned down the victim! We protested in front of the police station every week, one for each year of Eric’s life, but the cop was never charged, and once again, a family was left traumatized.

Black and Latin youth are the main targets as the bosses’ system terrorizes the working class to prevent rebellion over the conditions they have created in the name of their sick profit system.

Over the last 36 years, I estimate I’ve directly participated in over 20 campaigns against KKKops murdering Black and Latin people. As a moving antiracist song puts it, there are “Too Many Names.” This is a lifelong struggle. Just as racist terror is the front lines of the bosses’ rising fascism, our fightback against these crimes must be the frontline of our fight for communism, to expose the bosses’ racist state. Hasta el final (Til the end)!