Three Months into 2021 and Police Already Killed Three-Hundred-and-Nineteen People
By Mukta Ahmad|April 20, 2021
Brooklyn, New York — Only three days in 2021 where law enforcement in the United States did not kill someone. And during the ongoing trial of Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd, more than 60 people died in police custody all over America. Derek Chauvin and three other officers arrested Mr. Floyd because he brought cigarettes with a $20 counterfeit bill.
It is not known whether Mr. Floyd knew that he was giving a counterfeit bill. Video footage from bystanders and body cameras of the police officers shows Mr. Chauvin had his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 46 seconds after Mr. Floyd was put in handcuffs which caused his death.
“Police brutality is simply the latest manifestation of a 400 years old problem,” said Bryan Stevenson, an American lawyer, and a social justice activist.
Right before the start of the trial of Derek Chauvin, Chicago police officer Eric Stillman claimed the life of a 13-year-old boy, Adam Toledo. Stillman said Toledo had a gun in his hand before he was shot down but video from the officers bodycam shows he had his hand up high and empty as he was shot in the chest on March 29, 2021.
The video of Adam Toledo being fatally shot came out as another officer in Minneapolis was charged with second-degree manslaughter for the death of a 20-year-old in Minneapolis.
Police killed more than three people every day from March 29, since the trial of Derek Chauvin started.
Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology and coordinator of policing, social justice project at Brooklyn College said that “race is a factor” in these killings “but it’s primarily a structural factor.”
In the summer of 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old white boy who shot protesters in Kenosha, Wis. which resulted in the death of two protesters and one injured. In a video, Rittenhouse could be seen carrying a gun with his hand up as he walks away from the protesters, and police officers responding to the scene ignore him and proceed toward the protesters.
On November 22, 2014, Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy was shot by Cleveland police officers for having a toy gun in his hand. Now the family is asking “Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to reopen the Justice Department’s investigation into the shooting, which was closed in December after the department said it could not charge the officers.”
Gaurav Jashnani, a grad student at the CUNY Graduate Center, studying policing said, “The problem is not just the bias of individual officers. It’s a structural problem, and it’s an institutional problem.”
Two philosophers, Todd May and George Yancy wrote, “Policing Is Doing What It Was Meant to Do.” In an Op-Ed at the New York Times, both Mr. May and Mr. Yancy explain that the U.S. police force initially started off as slave patrols and then in the 19th century they were there to enforce “Black Codes and Jim Crow laws.”
They wrote the police “succeed in keeping people of color in their place so that they don’t challenge the social order that privileges middle- and upper-class white people.”
After police officers kill an unarmed black man or woman many people like to say it’s just “A few bad apples” doing a bad job, not all police officers are like them. Barack Obama made a statement on Twitter on May 29, 2020, following the death of George Floyd. In the statement, the former president makes the distinction between a “good cop” and a “bad cop” when he said “the majority of men and women in law enforcement who take pride in doing their tough job the right way, every day.”
It is not to say that there are no good police officers because there are. However, the role of policing in the United States is more complicated than just one police officer acting on their racist bias and killing black Americans at the rate of 3 times more than white Americans.
As Chris Burbank, Vice President for Strategic Partnerships for Center for Policing Equity and the former police chief said “No racism is not the only reason, and in fact, in a lot of circumstances, racism is not necessarily the underlying cause.” He also said it is not only the bias of individual officers but “It is more the bias of the system in which we live” that is more likely to kill black people at a higher rate than any other race.
Let’s look at the case of a good police officer who stopped another officer from using lethal force on a suspect they already arrested. Cariol Horne, a former police officer, stopped her colleague from using a chokehold on a black man who was already handcuffed, but then she was fired from the police department for it, in 2008.
After years of fighting in court and protest, she was finally vindicated for saving the life of a black man. The policing system in the United States protects police officer that uses lethal force on people of color who are unarmed and not resisting, just like during slavery slave patrols used any force necessary to stop the slave from running away.
