Ralph Yarl is 16. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri. He is Black. On April 13, 2023, his parents asked him to pick up his younger twin brothers from an address at 115th Street. Ralph made an all-too-common mistake: he went to a house on 115th Terrace. At around 10:00 p.m., Ralph rang the doorbell and waited on the stoop for his brothers to come to the door. Instead, when the door opened a few minutes later, he came face-to-face with 84-year-old white resident Anthony D. Lester, brandishing a .32 caliber pistol. Without provocation or warning, Lester shot Ralph through the glass outer door, hitting the child once in the head, shouting “Don’t come around here.” He then stepped forward and shot Ralph in the arm. Ralph, although critically wounded, managed to run and cry for help. Police had already issued a warning of an armed and dangerous gunman in the area and directed residents to remain inside their homes. Ralph passed by multiple houses before the residents of one, in front of which he collapsed onto his knees, disobeyed the police warning and came to the child’s aid. They called an ambulance, and Ralph was taken to the hospital. Miraculously, by the next Monday, after spending a weekend and more in an Intensive Care Unit, Ralph was discharged and returned home; he is expected to make a full recovery.
The police arrested Anthony Lester later that night on probable cause, but released him after a 24-hour holding period, without charges. For four tense days, Ralph’s family, and the Black community in Kansas City, grieved and demanded justice, while Lester sat at home, free of charges. Obeying police instruction, local news agencies protected the perpetrator by refusing to speak or print his name. Nevertheless, local community members gathered in protest outside Lester’s house on 115th Terrace over the next few days, persistently demanding he be brought to justice for his attempted murder of an unarmed Black child. The police, the state prosecutor, and the Missouri courts did not want to prosecute him.
Anyone can see that this was an attempted murder. The Missouri statute for second degree murder, 565.021, is simple. It requires only that the perpetrator knowingly caused the death of another person or, with the purpose of causing serious physical injury, caused the death of another. There is no reasonable debate to be had. No one shoots a child in the head without intending at the very least to cause serious injury. Lester, in no uncertain terms, shot to kill, and Ralph almost died.
Missouri, like many states in the U.S. Empire, also has a so-called “attempt” statute (562.012). To be found guilty of an attempted crime, the law of Missouri requires only that the perpetrator have taken a “substantial step” toward carrying it out. Failing to successfully carry out the crime in question is not a defense. Being physically unable to carry it out is not even a defense. In other words, Ralph’s survival makes Lester no less guilty of attempted murder in the second degree. Moreover, the penalty for a criminal attempt in Missouri is the same as the penalty for the completed crime — in this instance, ten to thirty years imprisonment.
Now, most people believe that the police are obligated to enforce the law and “protect and serve” people. That’s why they exist, after all, right? What would be the point of the police if they only “protected and served” when they felt like it?
Good question! In fact, police explicitly aren’t obligated to enforce the law or protect people from danger — not even life-threatening danger. In a 5–4 decision in 1989, DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dept. of Social Services, the Supreme Court of the United States warned that citizens have “no affirmative right to governmental aid, even where such aid may be necessary to secure life, liberty, or property interests.” The Court ruled in that case that the county’s department of social services had no duty to protect a young boy from being beaten until he suffered brain damage, despite the fact that his mother repeatedly begged them to intervene. This doctrine, now well-established in U.S. law, also applies to police departments. For example, in the 2005 case Castle Rock v. Gonzalez, SCOTUS ruled 7–2 that police have no affirmative duty to protect people — even when doing so will prevent murder. In that case, a woman, Mrs. Gonzalez, called the police because her husband abducted her children, and she feared for their safety. In fact, she had an active protective order in place preventing him from coming to her house or seeing the children. The police chose to wait and see what happened. Mr. Gonzalez murdered all three of their children and then committed “suicide by cop.”
Every day, thousands of people across the U.S. Empire are arrested on “probable cause.” Only a modicum of evidence is required to make a “probable cause” arrest: If a single person says out loud that they saw a crime being committed, that is sufficient for police to arrest a suspect. Probable cause is so broad as to be essentially a free pass to police to arrest almost anyone at any time, for any (or virtually no) reason. Prosecution of any crime requires merely probable cause to proceed. This may be confused with another standard of proof, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which is the standard for conviction in a criminal trial. To bring charges, all prosecutors need is a a few threads of evidence: hearsay, or a person claiming to have witnessed, for example, the suspect giving money to a friend on the street, or pocketing an item, or running down a street, or otherwise “acting suspicious,” is sufficient “probable cause” to support an arrest and continue prosecution for an illicit drug sale. “Probable cause,” those thin threads, prevents defendants from getting cases dismissed — cases upon which any reasonable person would say the state has no grounds to proceed. As a result, hundreds of people lose their jobs, their homes, and their families or are incarcerated each month — on these scant probable cause.
Every day, lawyers challenge probable cause on cases far less evident than this one, and judges in every court in the country frown and reply, “It’s only probable cause, counsel,” before overruling the defense. Yet in the case of Andrew Lester, who was witnessed and admitted to shooting Ralph Yarl, point-blank, in the head, the police decided, and attempted to convince an enraged public, that there isn’t enough evidence to arrest this would-be child killer. The emperor is not only naked and exposed; he has been skinned and hanged from the branches of a sycamore tree.
The Black community of Kansas City, and their allies, did not wait for the police to act. They demanded action. The masses, primarily the local Black working-class community, poured into the streets. They gathered in front of Lester’s house to demand justice. They gathered in front of the police station to expose the lie of “protect and serve.” Missouri has not forgotten any of her dead — not Michael Brown, not any of the Black lives cut short by white supremacy. The Movement for Black Lives has only sunk deeper and broader roots among the masses; its demands have become more organically and urgently adopted with each Black life cut short by the U.S. Empire’s regime of apartheid terror. The people protested for days, crying for action. Slogans that have become all-too-familiar in their demands for justice denied under the white supremacist empire were heard on the streets — “Black lives are under attack!”; “Standup, fight back!”
An organization calling itself The People’s Coalition led the protests, mobilized marches, prepared slogans, and channeled the wrath of the people into an undeniable, if still localized, political force. The Yarl family’s lawyer, Ben Crump, pressed the attack, demanding the recalcitrant state immediately arrest Lester. It’s not only in Missouri that voices have been raised. No, across the entire empire, the people have lifted their voices in protest. Black outrage and working-class solidarity rose swiftly.
Two days ago, over one thousand students at Staley High School in Missouri walked out of class in an organized display of protest at the callousness of Kansas City officials. Ralph’s friends and classmates carried signs and banners, and condemned the failure of the city to prosecute Lester, then to release him on a low bond — $200,000 — when most attempted murderers look at bonds of $1 million or more.
This firestorm has even drawn, like a dying, confused moth to a mighty inferno, the undead imperial president Biden, a man of an age and complexion with the murderous Lester, to Kansas City. There he and his second-in-command Kamala Harris took the opportunity to denounce, of all things, gun violence. Gun violence! Of course the white supremacist state has tried to tie the shooting of a young Black man by a white would-be killer, as pure an expression of direct national oppression, of murder motivated undeniably by racism, as a problem caused by the white supremacist’s tool! God forbid the oppressed take up the same tool, and wield it against their oppressor! No, it wasn’t the gun that gave rise to lynch terror! It’s not the gun that causes Black children to fear the police from childhood — the same rabid dogs-in-blue who will routinely pummel, tase, and strangle Black people to death without once drawing a gun! It wasn’t gun violence the people of Kansas City gathered to combat: it was the white supremacist state — the state that refused to bring a racist child-killer to justice, until it was forced to.
But that state, that white supremacist state, is afraid! Its servants keenly remember the of the 2020 Summer Uprisings, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and fear the specter of another rebellion. They know that the next wave could begin anywhere, and they are desperate to prevent it. The prosecuting attorney and his compatriots in the Kansas City police have finally made the decision to hold Lester “accountable,” and city officials have finally acknowledged that the crime had a “racial component.” But they will just as soon provide for Lester’s acquittal, if they believe the public is no longer watching. It’s not the crime that concerns them — it’s the threat of another uprising.
The people have everything within their power. When they are united and prepared, nothing can stand against them, not even the white supremacist state of the most powerful empire in human history. We have seen it reel; we have seen it falter. Now, the pressure must be kept up, not only to prevent Lester from entering a favorable plea deal or the state prosecutor from purposefully bungling a trial, but also to remind our oppressors of the cost of injustice — and only the people can do that.
