After the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis two weeks ago, a spontaneous nationwide movement of millions of people protesting racist policing has gripped the country. Politicians of all stripes have staked out their positions, condemning, endorsing, or trying to co-opt the radical movement. The latest of these is failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
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After just over a week of demonstrations, the number of Americans arrested in the George Floyd protests far exceeds that of over a year’s worth of protests in Hong Kong. A survey of just 30 police departments conducted on Tuesday found that they had collectively detained over 11,000 individuals, meaning the actual number detained across the entire country is certain to be higher.
The evening before President Trump lumbered over to St. John’s Church for his infamous “photo op,” U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr quietly instructed all 56 regional departments of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) to “identify criminal organizers and instigators” in the nationwide protests elicited by George Floyd’s murder.
Elisabeth Epps, a Colorado-based attorney and bail activist, publicly resigned from the Denver Police Department’s Use of Force Committee last night after being shot and tear gassed by the same force she was trying to regulate. “Plenty of Black folks will shuck & jive for ya, it just can’t be me anymore,” Epps said via Twitter, sharing pictures of the welts across her body and legs from police gunshots.
Even as the president has overseen a nationwide wave of police brutality in response to the George Floyd protests, Democrats are voting to increase the executive branch and the national security state’s powers.
New York City (BAR) — The aftermath of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis, Minnesota police has created a national political crisis. The revulsion caused by this latest killing caught on camera spawned protests in Minneapolis and all over the country. Black people are the angriest, knowing they are at risk of the same treatment and because most police killings rarely result in convictions.
With all the protests and anger and violence across the country, a justified discussion about policing has begun on our corporate media airwaves. (I would say the discussion is overdue, but in fact, we’ve had it roughly every three years for the past 40 years.) However, despite all the coverage, a deeper debate sits ignored – A debate about why our American police system exists at all, how it works (or doesn’t), and where it came from.
The following 19 facts about American policing will change everything you think you know. First, let’s start with the sheer amount of murder.
Over the past few months, the latest in a long history of extrajudicial killings of Black Americans has claimed the lives of three people: Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year old man gunned down in February by a gang of armed white men who chased him through a South Georgia neighborhood; Breonna Taylor, massacred in her own home by police officers who were serving a no-knock warrant on her apartment last March in relation to a drug case that had nothing to do with the budding 26-year old
Will Smith was quoted saying that racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed, and indeed, it is being filmed a lot lately. No sooner did we begin to recover from one victim of racist violence, the next victim is slain. Just as we began to wrap our heads around the murder of Breonna Taylor, we saw the lynching-murder of Ahmaud Arbery, and then came the murder of George Floyd.
