PHOTO/FRANK JOHNSON
CHICAGO, IL — If the capitalists do not need to hire you, they will not provide your loved ones with mental health treatment services. They will not resolve your domestic troubles even when you call their police for help. That means murder of the poor and dispossessed under this dying capitalist system.
Once again, on December 26, proof came from the guns of Chicago Police officers who took the lives of Quintonio Legrier, 19, and his downstairs neighbor Bettie Jones, 55, on the city’s West Side. Later the same day police nearly killed Mekel Lumpkin, in his 20s, on the South Side.
Officers shot Jones as she opened the door to her building for officers investigating a call for a domestic disturbance. Three bullets hit her and seven hit Legrier standing near her. He was reported to be wielding a metal bat while mentally disturbed.
“It’s like you call for help, and you lose someone,” Legrier’s mother told reporters, “and that has to stop.” Legrier’s father has sued the city over his son’s death.
Lumpkin was shot five times, also because of a reported domestic disturbance. Witnesses said police shot him after he laid down a gun and raised his hands.
On December 30, police in Zion, Illinois shot Charles Hollstein, 38, three times in the back. Hollstein was unemployed. His father said his son had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
A study by the Treatment Advocacy Center has this to say: “. . .a minimum of 1 in 4 fatal police encounters ends the life of an individual with severe mental illness. At this rate, the risk of being killed during a police incident is 16 times greater for individuals with untreated mental illness than for other civilians approached or stopped by officers.”
Further, only 1,800 out of 11,000 cops had been trained in crisis-intervention training (CIT) and less than half of mental health related calls were answered by CIT-trained police (Chicago Reader).
In 2012, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel closed six municipal mental health clinics—mainly in poor communities. Two years later, one third of Cook County Jail’s 10,000 inmates had some kind of mental illness (The Atlantic).
These killings express the real social agenda of an abundantly wealthy capitalist class that will not take any responsibility for the well-being of workers whose labor they no longer need. Corporate-controlled government is privatizing or destroying public services and building a police state on the backs of the poor and dispossessed of all nationalities.
The officers who shot Legrier, Jones, Lumpkin and Hollstein must be brought to justice. But no one talks any more about a few rotten apples in the police barrel. For the sake of survival, the dispossessed must unite and struggle for their own solution—a new society.
I recently spoke to a friend of mine who occupied a closing mental health center in 2012 in one of the poorest areas of Chicago. She told me about how one policeman who evicted her from the area sexually caressed her down before releasing her. I asked her why she did not fight him and she said that he probably would have shot her and have gotten away with it just because she is African-American. Among her other mental health illnesses, she now suffers from PTSD!
She pointed this policeman out from the TV and said that he is still on duty and she is very afraid. Who could blame her?
Corporations are now using violence against employees. Elements of Natzism are alive and well in America.