JUSTICE FOR FRANCIS!
“I can’t breathe.”
How many times? How many times will these words be uttered from under the weight of a police pig’s boot, knee, or headlock? How many times will we allow these words to be uttered before we say: ENOUGH!
Echoing forward from the streets of Minneapolis in 2020 from the lips of George Floyd; Aurora, Colorado the year before from Elijah McClain; and back through history, the phrase was once again uttered for a last time a week ago from Haverhill, in our own state of Massachusetts. This time, it was a middle aged—and, as usual, unarmed—man named Francis Gigliotti. Fiancé, uncle, brother, and friend, Francis reportedly was ‘just getting his life back together’ following a string of personal losses and tragedies.
But using the tired old excuse of “erratic behavior,” the Haverhill pigs, called to help a clearly distressed man, did what little they do best and instead escalated the situation, tackling and murdering Francis in cold blood, in front of his fiancée, and in the broad light of day.
The people of Haverhill, including friends and family of the deceased, held a vigil for Francis on Saturday, July 12th, and protested outside the Haverhill Police Department the following day to demand justice, with some making calls for the killer cops to be fired and indicted for murder. Meanwhile, Mayor Melinda Barrett is “monitoring circumstances” and calling for “calm”, as well as (most sincerely, we are sure!) assuring residents that police body cameras—which Haverhill conveniently doesn’t use—are “part of contract negotiations” (didn’t we have a national conversation about this five years ago?), and that the culpable officers have been placed on (paid, of course) leave. Meanwhile, the pigs, scrambling to cover their tracks—after again having to be reminded that any person with a shred of humanity acknowledges that murder is bad—assure the public that Francis was high when they assaulted him… as if that’s a justification for eight armed officers to suffocate a man to death in public. It certainly wasn’t enough to prevent Francis from calling his fiancée in the minutes before his death, and telling her “they’re gonna kill me!”
The déja vù is cloying. We’ve been through this before. We’ve seen the spineless platitudes our governmental officials, cowardly liberals, and boot licking conservatives will give us. We know that in response to our calls for justice, our calls for healing, our calls for accountability (the least we could possibly call for in light of the systematic and senseless killing to which we are subjected year in and year out) we will be mocked with vague and scolding platitudes of ‘calm’, ‘more training’, ‘more funding’, ‘more respect’, and ‘reform.’ But if the logic of reform were sound, would not the issue have been fixed years ago, with the last time this country allegedly had a ‘reckoning’ over policing? Every new killing shows the situation clearly has not changed.
Enough.
How many times do they expect us to fall for this sick and disingenuous mockery of a ‘solution’? How many times must we watch our neighbors, our friends, our brothers, our sisters, our fathers, our mothers—anyone we might know, care for, or feel bonds of connection to—be senselessly and brutally murdered?
There is one answer for anyone with eyes to see as to why this keeps happening: policing itself is rotten. There is no amount of training, funding, or ‘accountability’ which will mend the core logic of policing: to protect property over people; to protect money over life; to protect privilege over justice. And whose logic is that? Whose logic do these swine protect? Who sics them on us and then covers for them when they rampage across the country leaving murder, theft, assault, and abuse in their wake? Why, the people who abuse, steal from, and lie to us the rest of the time! That is to say, the bosses, the landlords, the owning class, the bourgeoisie.
And lest we think this is an issue solely for our Black and non-white siblings throughout this country, we need look only at Francis, or Justine Diamond, or any number of other police murders. Police violence most acutely targets nonwhite communities, flourishing in the soil of white supremacy, but its poisonous tendrils stretch out to harass and choke the oppressed masses of every racial background: the pigs will murder any person in front of their beady little eyes who don’t directly and enthusiastically serve the purposes of their ghoulish bourgeois masters. The violence the police subject us to is the violence these masters wish to see done to us.
If we take the path which we are repeatedly and brutally shown is the only one available to us, that is, ripping up the noxious weed of policing at its putrid roots and tossing it on the pyre of history to burn to cinders, we will find quickly that these squirming roots connect back also to the sources of the rest of our oppression as well: the tyranny of racism, of the workplace, of the landlords, of the constant exploitation and drudgery to which we, the working class of this country, are subjected by the ruling bourgeois class, and which sustain its very survival. It has always been the work of police to defend and perpetuate the survival of this vampiric class—from the days of the slave patrol right up to the present day.
ACAB! JUSTICE FOR FRANCIS! ABOLISH THE POLICE! ABOLISH CAPITALISM!