On May 29th, two friends and I were driving by Central and San Mateo when we saw police lights flashing and a handful of police scrambling to throw up yellow crime scene tape. I’ve never seen cops looking that frantic, and I immediately knew in my gut that they had just killed someone. We parked our car and, sure enough, the people who had witnessed it told us what that the cops had shot a man just minutes before, and we saw the body of Robert Salas laying on the parking lot of the old Walgreens. The paramedics came, tried to resuscitate him, and we saw their gurney leave without Robert’s body on it, signaling that he was dead on scene.

My friends and I immediately confronted the cops, loudly asking which one of them had killed this man. Robert Salas had just been murdered and none of the police had even an ounce of dignity to reply to us or answer our justified question. We reminded them that their coworker just murdered someone and them not responding was covering up a murder, covering up a criminal. We told them that we thought police were supposed to arrest people for crimes, so why are they hiding? Where were they hiding the murderer; who did it? We called them murderers to their faces and reminded them that their buddies had already killed another person just three days before for going through a mental health crisis, 23- year old Jose Armas.

Meanwhile, the cops were expanding their “crime scene” to the other side of San Mateo and the other side of Central with their yellow tape, barking at anyone who was inside the new designated “crime scene” to move to the outside of the tape. This was ridiculous. As we told them, they are the criminals. So why should they declare where the ‘crime scene’ starts and ends? The people who were at the bus stop or on the sidewalk who had just witnessed a murder weren’t the criminals. The police are! So why do they have any right to investigate this? Why would they have any right to expand their crime scene?? It’s just because they wanted to cover their asses (which, besides murder and harassment, is what cops do best). They wanted to push people out, so that more cops could come to “investigate” (in reality, getting paid to stand around at the site of their murder) and less people would see the absolute horror that was Robert Salas’ dead body laying on the concrete.

The Sargent really did not like what we were saying. He made threats that we would be arrested if we continued to expose what the cops did to their faces. We told him, we aren’t the criminals, you are, so why would we be arrested. Those threats mean nothing to us. He didn’t like that, so he sicced his cops on us. We have video evidence of the cops grabbing one of my friends and bringing her from behind the tape into their ‘crime scene’ and arresting her, and seconds later grabbing me and pulling me through the tape so that the tape actually snapped (i thought they cared so much about their precious crime scene?) and pushing me on to the ground where three cops violently arrested me. In our videos, you can see the force in which these three cops pushed me down so that my knees were bloody and bruised for weeks after, my shirt completely lifted up, and they forcefully jerked my arms behind me. Minutes later, they also arrested my other friend.

The police murder people, constantly. In 2025, at least 1317 lives were stolen by police across the country, and 30 of those people were in New Mexico. And they get away with it pretty much every time. Most cops who kill people never see a day behind bars in their lives. The name of the killer cop is usually hidden from the family of the victim and the public for months or even years while the cops do an “investigation” on themselves. The killer cop is either then not criminally challenged in court or if they are, they receive support from the judges and typically (even in the most outlandish cases) the murder is deemed “justified”. This happens while the public image of the person who was killed is smeared relentlessly, which fulfill the police’s narrative of rationalizing the murder. Immediately after the police kill someone, any interactions with law enforcement or criminal history that the victim had throughout their life (it doesn’t matter if it was a DUI 20 years ago) and their mug shot is blasted on the news. This usually happens before the story of what took place to lead up to the killing is released. This is a tactic used by the police to protect their killer cops and their public image, so that, first and foremost, the public believes the victim to be a criminal who deserved to be killed, and the police had to do what they had to do.

That’s why the police were so comfortable standing there and showing their faces right after their co-worker assassinated Robert Salas in broad daylight. Because the police know that for them, there are no consequences for their crimes. They have their strategy down-pat of how to get away with murder, so when we attempted to throw a wrench in those tactics on the scene, by confronting them, exposing them, and not backing down, they used their strategy of violence and repression to try to shut us up.

This is exactly why we need to be fighting back against police brutality. Taking a stand against police brutality opens us up to great risks; after all, the police brutalize and kill people every day, and lifetimes have been spent in prison because of people taking justified stands exposing and fighting back against the the crimes of the police. But this repression is also why we need to be fighting back. Police have unlimited power to harass and brutalize any person, organization, or neighborhood that pose a threat to the status quo. They are foot soldiers carrying out the agenda of the government and the ruling class. Through creating the laws that criminalize the masses of people and also through the ruling class’ media apparatus that convinces people to believe that the ruling class are the good guys while the masses of oppressed people are the bad guys, the bourgeoisie is able to determine what is acceptable in society and who is a criminal. For example: the US government contracts the construction of weapons factories that manufacture bombs dropped on hospitals and schools in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran as normal while throwing felonies and years in prison on the activists who try to shut down these weapons manufacturing plants. They use ICE to kidnap immigrants off the street and implement detention centers to detain and subject immigrants to torture, while sentencing the Prairieland Defendants to decades in federal prison on terrorism charges for having a noise demonstration outside of one of these Detention Centers, Prairieland. Mumia Abu-Jamal spent decades on death row for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer that he was never proven to have committed, while police kill well over 1200 people each year without consequence. The ruling class uses police brutality as a tool to oppress poor people, rip apart families, and to make poor and oppressed people powerless.

We have a responsibility to fight any charges thrown at us for going against the violent intentions of the ruling class. My friends and I called out cops for murdering Robert Salas moments after they murdered him and for that we spent a night in jail and each have two criminal charges. We have a responsibility to fight these charges; take them to trial if necessary. It might seem small, and they likely will try to dangle a plea, but it is our responsibility as people of conscious to flip the script. We know that what we did is not wrong. We are not criminals. The cops who killed Robert Salas, Jose Armas, Nani Tripp, Zachary Chavez, Solo Garcia, Mariah Voight, James Boyd, Tony Valenzuela, Peter Villalobos, Alejandro Campos Rios, Timothy Glaze, Antonio Casseem Armstrong, Terron Evans Jr, and the cops who killed tens of thousands more, those cops are the criminals. It is necessary to expose the tactics that the ruling class uses against the people, such as political repression, and to make it known that we will not accept any of those charges.