On March 27, cops killed 19-year-old Win Rozario in front of his family. While the NYPD insists that the execution was necessary, recently released body camera footage tells a different story.
At 1:53 PM on the 27th, two NYPD officers responded to a mental distress call made by Win Rozario himself. Soon after police arrived, Rozario felt threatened and grabbed a pair of kitchen scissors. Officers responded by shooting the teenager with tasers. According to the police narrative, Rozario’s mother then knocked the taser’s prong from her son while trying to hold him still. The officers drew their guns and, while his terrified mother and brother screamed and begged them not to fire, shot Rozario to death. Police maintain that this extreme escalation was necessary, that wielding scissors against armed and body armored officers is reasonable grounds for the summary execution of a teenager. They maintain that they feared for their lives, even after deploying their tasers.
The body camera footage reveals this to be a hollow lie. It shows what is now a sickeningly familiar scene — that police entered Rozario’s home and immediately escalated the situation to lethal violence. Rozario had called for help during a time of intense mental distress. The responders were armed thugs who only spoke to shout orders and only raised their hands to pull triggers. This didn’t happen due to a lack of officer training on mental health calls or by some mistake. The police were adhering to their prime directive, and carrying out their true social role: violent suppression of the colonized, and execution of those capitalism deems “mentally unfit” for production.
The purpose of a system is made clear by what it does. What police do reveals what police exist to do. There’s no mistaking it: U.S. police exist to brutalize the colonized, the poor, the mentally or socially “abnormal,” placed behind bars or within padded rooms, to keep them too battered and traumatized to resist the function of capitalism.
This is the reason the President of Columbia University unleashed this same department on her students. The same occupying force for which Biden recently reaffirmed his plans to raise the national funding by 37 billion dollars and increase the ranks by 100,000. He calls it “My Safer America Plan.” Here, we must congratulate the President on his honesty. It certainly will be safer for him and every member of his class, the settler-colonial capitalists. Because in order for them to sit so high, it must be on a mountain of beaten and incarcerated students and marginalized people, with swift execution awaiting all who show even the slightest resistance.
