New York City’s killer kkkops have struck again, murdering 19-year-old Win Rozario in Queens, a youth from Bangladesh who called the kkkops to help him with a mental health episode. The racist kkkops at the New York Police Department's (NYPD) account of the killing says the cops tased Rozario, then his mother accidentally knocked the taser prongs from his body, causing the teen to rush at the officers with scissors, and they had no choice but to fire. This, despite the situation being two cops to one person and Rozario’s brother contradicting their words, saying he was killed while their mother was holding him.
NYPD kkkops “serve and protect” the bosses
The bosses were all too happy to send trigger happy cops to kill Rozario rather than actual mental health professionals (New York Daily News, 3/31). Capitalism shows us everyday that it is ill equipped to help those suffering from mental illness. Rozario’s death is the latest in a string of racist killings involving mentally ill workers in the city, most of them Black and Latin. It also comes little over a year after cops in Massachusetts killed Arif Sayed Faisai, another youth from Bangladesh suffering from a mental health crisis. From Deborah Danner to Saheel Vassell to countless more lives, this capitalist system has nothing to offer workers but racist police violence and hopelessness.
The working class must run society - that’s communism!
As conditions for the working class worsen, as police killings continue, and as more and more wars rage around the world, we need to go beyond fighting for reforms. We need to organize for communism, a system that will bring an end to the conditions that foster mental illness, and to all police murders as well. Communism is a system where workers internationally not only produce everything but also distribute all goods based on need.
At a vigil for Rozario in Jackson Heights days after his death, the working class, mostly from Bangladesh, came out to demand justice and the release of the NYPD video footage. The working class anger at this killing was palpable. Rozario’s death comes after decades of built up racism against Southeast Asian workers after 9/11, not to mention the NYPD’s known program of spying on Muslim communities since at least 2002. However, without a communist focus, these workers will be won to identity politics and more “police reform” that will ensure kkkop killings and capitalism continue.
Democratic Mayor Adams: what liberal fascism looks like
Liberal racist Mayor Eric Adams, who had much to say about a recently killed cop in Far Rockaway, was noticeably silent when it came to Rosario, showing his indifference to another Brown worker dying from his death squad. In 2015, when the NYPD began its so-called “de-escalation training” for encounters with mentally ill workers, they killed at least 16 workers experiencing such crisis in succeeding years, with 14 of them Black, Latin and Asian workers (ProPublica, 12/4/20). Rather than give these workers the housing and assistance they truly need, Adams instead opened a useless hotline as a guide for his Nazis in blue for forcibly hospitalizing any worker who “appears” mentally ill (The Guardian, 7/13/23). Giving the NYPD even broader authority to detain anyone they wish is another sign of rising fascism.
Join the Progressive Labor Party
Progressive Labor Party has been at the forefront of several anti-racist protests and fightbacks against racist cop terror in NYC. There is only one way out of this capitalist hellhole, and that’s uniting with other workers to overthrow it once and for all! For Win, and too many other names, join PLP to shut this racist system down!