Fascist pigs murder unarmed, mentally-ill Brooklyn teen

(Pictured: Killer KKKops mark spent bullet shells at the site of Khiel Coppin's murder.) Last night five killer cops unloaded 20 rounds on an unarmed mentally-ill Brooklyn teen, 13 of the shots hitting their mark. Khiel Coppin, 18, was even handcuffed after being gunned down, his lifeless body dragged away by the NYPD assassins and taken to Woodhull Hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Coppin was carrying a hairbrush, which eyewitnesses said he dropped when raising his hands in the air in front of the police, before being cut down in a hail of bullets. Several witnesses reported that the police fired so many rounds that one officer began yelling, “Stop, stop, stop shooting — he’s down,” but that cops kept firing like they were "playing with a toy.”

Coppin's mother had tried to have her son admitted for psychiatric treatment leading up to the event. After a dispute last night, she called 911 in an effort to have him removed to get help for his mental illness. The cops' story has changed drastically several times already between last night and this morning in an effort to keep up with what everyone else present at the shooting witnessed, but all of their stories hinge on the claim that his mother had warned the 911 dispatcher that her son had a gun--a charge the mother denies. Additionally, police are trying to wash the youth's blood from their hands by speculating that Coppin was attempting "suicide by cop," a bigoted charge commonly leveled upon mentally-ill victims of cop murder.

In one police story, Coppin has a knife, in others he doesn't. In one he drops from a window with the hairbrush under his shirt (hence their "believing" it to be a gun), and charges at the police while reaching under his shirt for the hairbrush, ignoring orders to halt--but in a different version of the police narrative, he walks across the sidewalk to them. But all witnesses state clearly that he lowered himself from his window to the ground, stood and immediately raised his hands up in the air, dropping the hairbrush to the ground. Then, police opened fire, murdering another working-class urban youth.

In the coming days, as always happens, liberal misleaders and reformers will try to contain the righteous anger of the working class, funneling it instead into their reform efforts like "community policing" and "police oversight," and their election campaigns. But if we want to stop police murder, we can't fall into this trap! The only way to smash the klan in blue is to smash the racist system--capitalism--that uses them to terrorize urban working-class communities. Communism--the system of workers' power, a society run for need, not profit--will sweep away these new night riders and their politician-masters, crushing them like the cockroaches they are. But for this, we must organize! Now, more than ever, is the time direct our anger where it belongs: not into more dead-end reform campaigns designed solely to keep angry workers and youth under control, but into the streets!