The New York Times
During the trial on the death of George Floyd, murders by police
MINNEAPOLIS – Just seven hours before prosecutors opened their case against Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd, a Chicago officer found a 13-year-old boy in a West Side street chased and fatally shot him as he raised his hands. A day later, at a hotel in Jacksonville, Florida, officers fatally shot a 32-year-old man who, according to police, grabbed one of their Tasers. The next day, while an eyewitness to Floyd’s death broke down in a courtroom in Minneapolis while telling what he saw, a 40-year-old mentally ill man who said he was being harassed by voices, in Claremont, New Hampshire, in a shootout with state police. Every day thereafter, and by the end of the testimony, another person was killed by police somewhere in the United States. Sign up for The New York Times’ The Morning Newsletter The trial has forced a traumatized country to relive Floyd’s gruesome death under Chauvin’s knee. But even as Americans continue to process that case – anxiously awaiting a verdict – new cases of people killed by the police continue unabated. Since the testimony began on March 29, at least 64 people have been killed by law enforcement nationwide, with black and Latino people representing more than half of the dead. As of Saturday, the average was more than three murders a day. The deaths, erased by The New York Times from databases on gun violence, news media accounts and legislation, provide a snapshot of policing in America at this time. They testify not only of the danger and desperation that police officers face on a daily basis, but also of the two-second choices and wrong steps by members of law enforcement that can increase the arrests from work to death. This is the result of domestic violence calls, traffic jams that went wrong, illness and chases. The victims often behave fickle, some suffer from mental illness and the appearance of anything that looks like a weapon makes things increase rapidly. And their outbursts were brutally known, from the graphic videos that so frequently emerge to the protest marches that so frequently ensue in the fight between law enforcement and protesters in streets filled with tear gas. Just as one community confronts one murder, another happens. Across the spectrum, from community activists to law enforcement, emotional and mental exhaustion – and the feeling that the country can not cope. “How many losses do we still have to mourn?” Miski Noor, co-executive director of Minneapolis-based activist group Black Visions, said in a statement after the murder of Daunte Wright, 20, during a recent stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. The pain of Floyd’s death “is still scorched in our minds and yet history repeats itself,” the statement continued. “Our community has reached its breaking point.” Last week, the mayor of Chicago called for calm because a “disturbing” footage of the body was released in the police murder of 13-year-old Adam Toledo. The shaky video shows a police officer responding to a call from shots, chasing a boy with a gun at night in a highway Latino neighborhood in a street. “Stop it now!” shouted the officer as he cursed. “Hands. Show me your hands. Leave it. Leave it.” A single shot drops the boy as he turns, raising his hands. Other recent fatal violence has shocked communities large and small: Michael Leon Hughes, 32, a black man who was shot dead on March 30 after, according to police, using a Taser on a Jacksonville police officer on a domestic dispute in a motel; Iremamber Sykap, 16, a Pacific islander, was killed on April 5 when he fled in a stolen Honolulu police stolen Honda Civic; and Anthony Thompson Jr., 17, a black teenager in Knoxville, Tennessee, were killed by police in a high school pool on April 12 after reports that a student had brought a gun to campus. All of these murders and many more took place when evidence unfolded at the trial in Minneapolis, though few drew as much national attention as the Wright shooting less than ten miles from the courthouse where Chauvin stood. Protests erupted in downtown Brooklyn after a veteran police officer fatally shot Wright, saying she mistaken her gun for her Taser when he tried to flee during a traffic stop. Abigail Cerra, a Minneapolis civil rights lawyer and a member of the Minneapolis Police Supervision Commission, said it was unclear why officers stopped him for a registration that had expired, a problem for many drivers in the state during the coronavirus pandemic. But two aspects of the case were, according to her, furiously known: that Wright was black and that the police had the task of extraditing him safely to the courts, where violations of the law were supposed to be judged, effectively carries a death sentence yielded. “This is just another example of nothing but offenses that have increased to mortality,” Cerra said. Although many of these murders play a well-known role, it is unfair to blame everyone for law enforcement, said Patrick Yoes, a retired sheriff’s captain and president of the national Fraternal Order of Police. “In many cities, it has to do with people feeling hopeless,” he said. “It’s poverty. It is a failing education system. It is all these things that are very important for the stability of a community. “This instability often puts officers in situations in which they confront individuals who are dangerous and non-compliant,” he said. Part of the reason society could not prevent deadly encounters between law enforcement and the community is that some people are unwilling to discuss the real challenges of crime that officers sometimes face, he said. “There are just so many factors that people have already decided and they think law enforcement is not based on race,” said Yoes, who is white. Under federal and state law, officers are justified by using lethal force as long as they have a “reasonable” fear of a “threatening” injury or death to themselves or another person. And jurors tend not to guess what a reasonable force might be at the moment. Of the 64 fatal meetings the Times has drawn up over the past three weeks, at least 42 have involved people accused of using firearms. More than a dozen have been involved in confrontations with people who were mentally ill or in trouble. And at least ten occurred when police responded to reports of domestic violence. Some dispute the idea that danger rather than prejudice will provoke the reactions of a law enforcement officer. “What I sometimes see is that in these encounters with people of color there is a different aggression,” said Ron Johnson, a retired captain of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, which led to the police response in Ferguson, Missouri. the murder of Michael Brown by police. in 2014. “This adrenaline is starting to go off the roof,” Johnson, who is Black, added. “And why? It’s because we do not have these experiences and this understanding of each other. And in some cases it is about humanity. We do not see them in the same human way as we see ourselves.” Since at least 2013, with a slight drop due to the pandemic, about 1,100 people are killed annually by law enforcement, according to databases compiled by Mapping Police Violence, a research and advocacy group investigating all such killings, including non-gun-related deaths such as Floyd’s. , whose numbers are limited to police shootings, reflects an equally flat trend line.Almost all victims since March 29 have been men, with black or Latino people significantly overrepresented – a pattern that reflects broader research on criminal reflection. most were under the age of 30. Four were teenagers Philip Stinson, a professor of criminal law at Bowling Green State University who commits civil killings by members of studied law enforcers, said the most striking aspect of the deadly police force statistics is how little the numbers have changed in the decade or two since then. researchers have begun to track them down. Even if cell phone videos and body cameras make it difficult to hide human error and abuse of authority by law enforcement – and even if social media exacerbates public outrage – only about 1.1% of civilian officials are charged with murder or manslaughter, Stinson said. Since early 2005, he said, 140 non-federally sworn law enforcers, such as police officers, deputy sheriffs and state troops, have been arrested on charges of murder or manslaughter as a result of a shooting on duty. Of these, 44 were convicted of a crime as a result of the incident, in most cases for a minor offense. This may be because many of the shootings are legally justified – or, as Stinson believes, because the legal system and the laws themselves are too extravagant for the police. This respect, he added, protects the status quo in the more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country. “All law enforcement is local,” he said. “Culture eats policy, as the saying goes, and we have a police subculture whose core elements in many places include the fear of black people.” Stinson cited the now infamous traffic stop of a uniformed army doctor detained by police and shot with pepper spray in Windsor, Virginia, a rural town near Norfolk. The meeting, which took place in December, came to light this month after Caron Nazario, a second lieutenant in the US Army Medical Corps, filed a federal lawsuit. The body footage showed members of the Windsor police station Nazario, who are Black and Latino, threatening and attacking after they stopped him because he had not yet installed permanent license plates on his new Chevrolet Tahoe. The footage underscores the extent to which police culture has resisted change in much of the country, Stinson said. “We only know about this one because he has a lawyer, they filed a civil lawsuit and they could get recordings that they could release,” he said. However, for many victims of police violence and their families, there is no video evidence you can rely on. In Daly City, California, police officers did not wear body cameras when they had a fight with Roger Allen, 44, while sitting in a car with a flat tire on April 7. Officers say Allen had a gun. according to Stephen Wagstaffe, the San Mateo County District Attorney investigating the case, on his lap. It turned out to be a shotgun, but an officer fired a fatal bullet at Allen’s chest during the crash. Now Talika Fletcher, 30, has said she struggles to reconcile the fact that her older brother, who was like a father figure, joined the dark black men who died among law enforcement. “In a million years, I never thought my brother would be a hashtag,” she said. She has little confidence that the dynamics between black men and law enforcement will be even better when her 14-month-old son, Prince, grows up. “The cycle,” she said, “is not going to change.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company