BROOKLYN NY,  October 21 — “We want justice for Kyam Livingston, killed in a Brooklyn cell!” rang out as the Committee for Justice for Kyam Livingston rallied in the Flatbush neighborhood where Kyam had lived. Today’s demonstration was bigger than last month’s, more neighbors joined the rally and many more watched and listened across the street from the rally or stopped as they exited the nearby subway. Hundreds of leaflets and over 250 CHALLENGEs were eagerly grabbed up by the rush hour crowd.
PLP has supported this fight from the start. We salute the family for their resolute commitment to continuing the struggle against the racist and callous treatment which caused Kyam’s death. What does it mean to get justice for Kyam? Can this family or others who have lost loved ones to racist police terror get justice under the rule of capitalism?
For months we chanted “we want the names, we want the tapes.” The cops who run Brooklyn Central Booking had refused to provided the names of those who were on duty in the Central Booking jail on July 21, 2013 when they denied medical attention to Kyam until she died. Likewise, they refused to acknowledge that there were video tapes of the holding cell let alone provide copies of them to the family. The months of struggle from the family, the community and the Party on the streets of Brooklyn helped us get that information.
The family has said that they want Brooklyn Central Booking to be cleaned up — to literally clean up the dirt and get red of the vermin — and changing the treatment of those held in the cells. It also means getting rid of those whose actions caused the death of Kyam. This is more difficult, because the atmosphere of the so-called criminal justice system is dictated from the top. The ruling class needs to politically divide the working class and intensify the oppression of black workers, and so wants racist, vicious treatment to be the usual way black workers and especially youth are dealt with by the system. While the cells might be clean for a while or a cop “thrown under the bus” here and there, the ruling class relies on terror here and around the world to make sure they remain in power.
While in some ways Kyam’s death was different from other racist police murders because the cops don’t even claim that she posed a threat or had a weapon, it is a part of the bigger pattern of racist murders by cops who view the lives of black and Latin workers unimportant and without value.
The main way that capitalists stay in power is by dividing all workers using racism, sexism and nationalism, and especially terrorizing some. In rare cases, some crumb will be thrown to try to pacify the workers, such as an indictment or even conviction of a racist cop. PL’ers have constantly raised the message of fighting for working-class unity to defeat racist police terror and destroying the ruling class, who rely on it for their very existence. We say the only way to win real justice is to destroy the capitalist’s system with communist revolution, and in order to get there we must fight back like Ferguson against each and every racist police murder with working class multi-racial unity.