The spread of COVID-19 has ebbed and flowed, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a brief “flattening of the curve,” but now another war has begun.
People worldwide started their protests peacefully in the name of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man from Minneapolis, Minn. who died when a White police officer knelt down on him for almost nine minutes, choking him to death.
Police officer Derek Chauvin has been fired and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. But looking at Chauvin’s track-record, could the death of Floyd have been avoided, if Chauvin had been discharged earlier?
According to his record, Chauvin already had 20 complaints filed against him, as well as two letters of reprimand, during his 19-year career in law enforcement. However, no actions were taken against him.
The death of an innocent African-American caused by police brutality is nothing new. According to collected data by the Washington Post, 1,004 people were killed by police in 2019. Of those, the data showed 235 were African-Americans. However, the number might be slightly higher, since 202 people who were killed by law enforcement were not racially identified. Between 2003 and 2019, the U.S. police killed 7,666 people, according to data collected by the research and advocacy group Mapping Police Violence.
Floyd died on May 25 as he was arrested in front of a grocery store he had visited regularly. This time he was there to buy cigarettes with an allegedly counterfeit $20 bill, the police report stated.
When Officer Chauvin arrived at the scene, he was trying to put Floyd inside the police car with the help of other officers. Floyd then fell facedown, as Chauvin pulled him from the passenger seat, still handcuffed.
Witnesses at the scene started to film the incident when Chauvin decided to put his knee on Floyd’s neck, as Floyd was restrained by the remaining officers at the scene.
The report by the prosecutors stated that Floyd repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe,” as he was begging, “please, please, please.”
Videos of the incident circled the internet and went viral like a brush fire. But what was aimed as a non-violent protest to fight for social justice and combat police brutality, ended in riots, violence and looting of stores. The chaos created by opportunists disturbed the peace of the protests, resulting in the state to call in the National Guard, and the police to use tear gas and rubber bullets.
The coalition PUSH LA—which stands for Promoting Unity Safety & Health Los Angeles—in collaboration with 15 non-profit advocacy groups who fight for social justice, such as Community Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, released a statement regarding the protests:
“As we analyze this weekend, the real story is the underlying root causes that have led us to these cries of anguish and outrage. For centuries, we Black folks have been suffocated under racial oppression and the lie of Black inferiority and White superiority. Our souls, our bodies, and our minds have been put under unendurable amounts of duress. Our communities have been looted financially and our people killed in countless heartbreaking incidents by state-sanctioned police violence.
“What shall you have us do when we’re put through stressors far past our ability to cope? Every city and state should be announcing the bold and structural change. They need to listen to what’s happening on the ground. It’s rumbling and breaking apart, unearthing hundreds of years of oppression. There’s no appropriate moderate approach during the worst inequality in American history and the continued murder of Black lives.”
The U.S. is not the only country fighting police brutality and racism. In Germany for instance, Afro-Germans started the hashtag #beiunsauch which means “here too,” VICE Media reported. Afro-Germans want to draw the attention that police brutality and racism is also an issue there. But it’s not just one demographic that is being targeted. Immigrants, elderly, and mentally ill are also often at risk for police brutality.
Videos of a 75-year-old White man in Buffalo, NY who got shoved by two police officers amid the current protests, and who was laying on the ground, bleeding, as well as the incident of a police officer repeatedly punching a 14-year-old boy in Sacramento, are just a few that went viral on social media and made headlines across the nation. And if there wasn’t any video footage, the storylines were quite different, looking at the police reports of each incident.
However, not every police officer abuses their authority. Many officers took solidarity with protesters, even marched with them such as Denver Police Chief Paul Pazen.
As the protest and violence continued, many leaders of South LA’s non-profit advocacy groups came together to write a direct response to Garcetti demanding him to pull back the National Guard; launch an investigation into the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD); and cut funding for the LAPD, in order to invest in Black communities instead.
“We have not seen a pandemic of the scale, swiftness, and severity of COVID-19 in over a century. But the virus of police violence against Black people has been with us for too long and is nothing new. While the current public health crisis is the result of a naturally occurring virus, the current crisis of public trust in law enforcement is entirely man-made. It is a result of broken promises and the failure of our institutions and our leaders to fundamentally address the problem of police violence and racial inequality in our public policies,” the group’s letter states.
Garcetti announced that he will cut $100 million to $150 million from the LAPD budget funds and reinvest those funds into communities of color instead. In Minneapolis, the city council even pledged to dismantle their police department entirely.
