Paula Lugones
05/29/2020 - 20:59
- Clarín.com
- World
It is painful to admit, but the murder of an African American who ended up dead with a white policeman's knee nailed to his neck for 8 minutes in Minneapolis, Minnesota is not surprising. It's a combination of police violence and racism, a fatal cocktail in the long-standing United States that President Donald Trump seems to be encouraging. To this is added another serious element: impunity.
A 2018 report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, entitled “Police violence against people of African descent in the United States,” recounts the excesses that this population has suffered and the structural drama that this minority suffers in this country.
He notes that the American police kill approximately 1,000 people and injure more than 50,000 each year on average. In 2017, at least 987 people were shot to death by police officers, including more than 300 who were fleeing from officers when they were shot, the report says. And he adds: "The annual number of registered police homicides in the United States is much higher, both in per capita terms and in absolute terms than in other developed countries."
The report also highlights police cruelty against the African American community : "Black men are almost three times more likely to be killed by the police force," he warns.
Protests against the police over the death of the black man George Floyd have not stopped for three days. / REUTERS
Neither violence nor racism is new here. But now citizens can see it live. The world was able to watch George Floyd on Facebook live, screaming from the floor "I can't breathe!" as the policeman squeezed his knee around his neck.
Meanwhile, in New York, the video of a white woman who called the police and falsely reported that an African American was threatening her was known, when she had only asked him to put the leash on his dog, as established by the rules. When Minneapolis caught fire, there were protests across the country. Also in Louisville, Kentucky, where hundreds of people were demanding the prosecution of the agents involved in a March case, when Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African-American medical technician, was shot eight times by three policemen who entered her apartment without warning.
The policemen who had been involved in Floyd's crime were forcibly evicted. But only after a night of violent protests, agent Dereck Chauvin was formally charged with murder and the FBI announced an investigation. The fury and fire were similar to that of six years ago in Ferguson, Missouri, due to the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old African American killed by the shooting of a white police officer. And to that of other cases such as that of Eric Garner, in New York, or that of Laquan McDonald, in Chicago. All with the same result: after a trial, the policemen were exonerated. Like almost all the agents involved in cases of brutality.
Protests over George Floyd's death in Minneapolis spread to several cities, including New York, this Friday. / AFP
Statistics and experts agree that, since Donald Trump came to power in 2016, hate crimes have increased and that the president's speech instigates attacks on minorities and immigrants. Trump often refers to Mexicans in the U.S. as "rapists" and "drug traffickers" and has resisted condemning attacks by white supremacists. Last year, he even asked four Democratic congressmen of Palestinian, Puerto Rican, Somali and African American ancestry to "return" to the "totally failed and crime-ridden places they came from," when three of them were born in the United States and one of them lived here since the age of 3.
Pain and anger, among the protesters who took to the streets of Minneapolis, in the state of Minnesota, to repudiate the death of a black man, handcuffed, at the hands of white police officers. / AFP
Now, instead of demanding punishment for those responsible for Floyd's death, he tweeted that the protesters were BULLIES, in capital letters, and warned that looters could be repelled by bullets. The phrase ("looting leads to shooting") was similar to the one uttered in 1967 by a questioned Miami police chief.
Within months of the November presidential election, Trump is betting on stoking the fears of the white majority, his voting base, and fears the already slim chances of winning at least a pinch of the African American vote, which overwhelmingly votes for Democrats. This vulnerable community, which has been especially hit these months by the effects of the coronavirus and unemployment, accumulates many fights. A recent poll by The Washington Post revealed that 8 out of 10 blacks describe the president as racist and 9 out of 10 disapprove of his overall performance. They feel pessimistic under Trump's leadership and emphasize that it is "a bad time to be African American in the United States."
Washington, correspondent