Police Murder of 19-Year-Old Christian Taylor

"How many hashtags now?"

August 10, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Yet another unarmed young Black person murdered by police! In the early hours of Friday, August 7, Christian Taylor, a 19-year-old student and defensive back on the football team at Angelo State University, was shot dead by police in Arlington, Texas.

Christian Taylor is the 696th person—and the 179th Black man—killed by police in the U.S. just in this year. And he was killed two days before the one-year anniversary of the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

The police claim that two cops were answering a burglary call at a car dealership, where they claim an “altercation” took place—and then an officer-in-training shot Taylor. First, people shouldn’t believe anything the police say—police around the country have been proven time after time to lie shamelessly about the murder and brutality they carry out. But one thing is undeniably clear: Christian Taylor was unarmed, and he was cut down in the prime of his youth by armed pigs acting under the color of authority.

Among the outpouring of grief and outrage at this latest brutal act of terror by the police was a tweet from tennis star Serena Williams: “Really??????!!!!!!!!!!? are we all sleeping and this is one gigantic bad nightmare? #ChristianTaylor how many hashtags now?”

As Christian Taylor himself had tweeted over the past year: “Police taking black lives as easy as flippin a coin, with no consequences smh” and “I don’t feel protected by the police.”

How many more lives will be so brutally and unjustly stolen by police across the U.S.? There was immediate anger at the murder of Christian Taylor, and over the past year we’ve seen a level of resistance to police brutality that hasn’t been seen in this country in decades. Yet the police terror continues, and killer cops continue to get exonerated. This intolerable situation underscores the urgent need for a huge outpouring in October in New York City to demand a STOP to police terror.

And this horror of police murder after police murder, especially of Black and Latino people, is part of all the other horrors that this system of capitalism-imperialism brings down, here and all around the world. Everyone who wants to see all this ended once and for all: get with the movement for revolution, here at revcom.us.

 

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