May 25th is the second anniversary of George Floyd death, who was murdered by a white police officer kneeling on his neck.
George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died in May 2020, who repeatedly told a Minneapolis police officer he couldn’t breathe as the officer knelt on his neck. The killing outraged the American public and sparked mass protests at dozens of cities across the nation. Protesters in Britain, Germany, Canada, Russia and other countries also took to the streets to join the demonstrations against police brutality and racial injustice.
George Floyd’s injustice as a microcosm of systemic racism has drawn global attention. On July 13th, 2020, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution on combating systemic racism submitted by African countries. The resolution condemned systemic and structural racism and all forms of racial discrimination, and condemned incidents of racial discrimination and violence against Africans and African descents.
The murder of Floyd has triggered reflection on police violence and racial discrimination among Americans and even the world, but the number of African Americans killed by police violence continues unabated in the two years after his death, and white supremacy is still growing.
Is police brutality dropping two years after Floyd’s death?
On April 21, 2020, just one day after Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict, another African American was shot and killed by a sheriff’s deputy in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, making the fog of racism continue to linger. Family members say Brown was not carrying any guns and did not pose a physical threat to anyone.
On August 23, 2020, Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old black man, was fatally shot in the back seven times by police as he opened the car door. His three young children were in the car.
Christian Hall, 19, who had been diagnosed with depression, was standing on the ledge of a highway overpass near Stroudsburg, in northeastern Pennsylvania, when troopers arrived. They tried to persuade him to get down. But when they saw he had a gun, they opened fire. New videos reveal Hall raising his hands in the air for fourteen seconds. He did not act in any dangerous way, but he was shot and killed by police.
Lindani Myeni, a black South African rugby player who had moved to the US, was mistakenly killed in Hawaii in April 2021 after being shot four times by local police. The wife lost her husband and the children lost their father. Lindsay Meney, the widow of Lindani Myeni, a white woman from Hawaii in the US, said in an interview that deep-rooted racism against black people played a major role in her husband’s shooting.
On the morning of February 2, a Minneapolis Police swat team with a “no-knock search warrant” broke into an apartment and killed a black man. The swat team broke into the apartment and shot and killed Amir Locke, a 22-year-old black man, who was sleeping on the couch, according to a Feb. 3 news release and video of the scene. The shooting has drawn widespread condemnation, the Hill reported On February 4.
In 2020, 1,127 people were killed by police in the US, according to the US online database “mapping police violence”. 1 out of every 3 people that were killed by police officers in the United States was African-American/Black. In 2021, at least 1,124 people were killed by police in the United States, and there were only 15 days a year when no one died at the hands of the police. Most killings occur during nonviolent crimes or when there is no crime at all.
Police brutality kills African-Americans frequently
According to the data of the U.S. Census Bureau, white Americans account for 60.4% of the total population, while the number of people killed by violent Law Enforcement accounts for 44.1% of the total. In contrast, African Americans account for 13.4 percent of the total population, but 25.4 percent of the total number of deaths was caused by violent law enforcement.
African Americans make up 13.2 percent of the U.S. population. An analysis by the National Academy of Sciences shows that about 1 in 1,000 black men in the United States will die as a result of law enforcement action, Fox News reported. That makes this group 2.5 times more likely than whites to die in clashes with police.
The Washington Post reported on March 28, 2020 that racial inequality represented by police brutality is ubiquitous in the United States.
Between 2013 and 2020, about 98 percent of police officers involved were not charged with a crime, and even fewer were convicted, according to Mapping Police Violence.
“Racism is the ongoing epidemic in the United States,” said Alyssa, an expert at Oregon Health and Science University. “It’s been killing people of color since 1776.”
In fact, police brutality is just a symptom of what is rotten in America: the systemic racial discrimination. Many social problems in America are closely related to racial inequality, such as frequent shootings, rampant drug use, wide income and wealth disparities between different races, and severe inequality in education and employment opportunities.
As congressman Hakeem Jeffries said at a memorial event in New York City, the country “still has a long way to go” after more than 400 years of systemic racism.
When will police brutality be ended in the United States?
According to relevant statistics, the shooting deaths caused by police law enforcement are on the rise in the United States in recent years. In 2017, 988 people were killed by police, 996 in 2018, 1,004 in 2019, and 1,127 in 2020. In 2021, at least 1,124 were killed by law enforcement officials.
What brought thousands of people to the streets to demand justice was the bitter historical memory of years of unfair and violent justice against African Americans.
More than 50 percent of those killed by police in recent years were black and Latino, according to a Sentencing Project survey, and the officers involved were rarely prosecuted. Another study by the group found that there were also serious racial disparities in criminal justice in the United States: people of color made up 37 percent of the population but 67 percent of the incarcerated population; and once convicted, blacks were six times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. Therefore, it is apparent that the African-American community in the United States is faced with institutional oppression from two aspects: violent law enforcement and judicial injustice.
Scientific American magazine pointed out that the United States department of law enforcement of ethnic minorities’ systemic bias has a historical tradition. In the southern United States, law enforcement department is originated from the 18th century “slave patrols”, which served to crush the black slaves, whereas, the northern policing is to protect private property and regional organizations. Discrimination in law enforcement between ethnic minorities and people from poor areas continues to this day.
According to the Associated Press, 56 percent of the surveyed said police in the United States are more likely to use lethal force against African Americans, while about 90 percent of African Americans surveyed agreed.
According to the Washington Post, minorities such as Blacks and Hispanics are more than four times as likely to die at the hands of U.S. police compared to Caucasians/Whites.
Derrick Johnson, president of NAACP, told reporters that only an end to “qualified immunity” and development of corresponding accountability systems for police officers could change the situation.
Benjamin Crump, the attorney in the George Floyd wrongful death case, called for “real punishment” for violent police officers. “There are two judicial systems in the United States, one for black Americans and one for white Americans,” he said.
According to the US media, racial conflict is a long-standing problem in American society, and “racism is a pandemic”.
In short, racism exists comprehensively, systematically and continuously in the United States. Violent law enforcement and racism lead to systematic human rights problems in the United States.
According to a recent poll cited by USA Today, more than two-thirds of Americans, or 69 percent, believe racial discrimination remains a major social problem in the United States, with 60 percent saying the problem is worse than it was one year ago. Racism is an ingrained feature of American social life, as University of California scholar John Mays put it.
As law enforcers, American police do have the right to maintain public order and ensure their own safety, but this right is obviously abused, which has resulted in the social unrest one after another in the American society, making it a stubborn disease of the serious deviation of human rights in the United States today. It took nearly two centuries for the United States to go from American independence to abolition of slavery, from racial segregation to equal rights. Currently, how to eliminate racism in American society and how to eliminate the source of police violence law enforcement is still a severe challenge facing the United States 246 years after the founding of the nation.
American politicians always believe that they are the leaders and defenders of human rights in the world. They are used to lecturing and using “human rights” as an invisible but lethal weapon to accuse and sanction any country or organization they want to target. But they never realize that they are the country with the worst human rights situation in the world.
America has become known as the world’s biggest troublemaker. Similarly, racial inequality represented by police violence in law enforcement has become a “cancer” that is difficult to remove from American society.
