Khadijah Ali
In the image on the left, the police officer has his knee firmly pressed against George Floyd's neck as he is pinned down on the ground. In the photo to the right, another police officer is gesturing in a threatening manner to onlookers to get back!
Horrified by the cold-blooded murder of another black man in America, thousands of people poured into the streets of Minneapolis and other cities for the second night on Wednesday (May 27).
The protests in Minneapolis “later turned chaotic as police fired rubber bullets from a rooftop, several buildings caught fire, and one person was shot and killed by a store owner,” according to the Washington Post.
The choking death of George Floyd by a white police officer pressing his knee against Floyd’s neck on May 25 evening was caught on a cell phone camera that later went viral on the social media.
As Floyd repeatedly complained “I cannot breathe”, and “Don’t kill me,” the burly white policeman ignored his pleas.
One eyewitness pleaded with the police to ease the pressure.
Floyd was bleeding from the nose and his sounds gradually grew softer under pressure.
The video lasted nearly nine minutes but Floyd appeared to go lifeless at around the six-minute mark.
Another police officer, of Chinese origin, was also seen in the video threatening passers-by who tried to plead with the police to ease the pressure on Floyd’s neck.
One onlooker even pleaded with the police to handcuff Floyd and put him in the police cruiser but to no avail.
When the ambulance arrived, Floyd was motionless while the policeman’s knee was still pressing against his neck.
One of the paramedics checked the pulse on Floyd’s neck and then went back to get the stretcher from the ambulance.
He was pronounced dead in hospital.
Why was it necessary for the policeman to press his knee on Floyd’s neck and keep him pinned down for so long when he was not resisting arrest and repeatedly said he could not breathe?
In a press conference on May 26, Minneapolis police confirmed Floyd “died a short time” after a “medical incident” (sic), after being transported to hospital.
“[They] were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and realized that the suspect was suffering a medical distress,” a spokesman said.
Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, apologized to Floyd’s family the day after he was choked to death, saying “[Floyd] should not have died,” according to a report in the British daily, The Guardian.
“For five minutes we watched as a white officer pressed his knee to the neck of a black man,” Frey said.
“For five minutes. This officer failed in the most basic human sense.”
While four Minneapolis policemen have been fired from their job, Mayor Frey said he could not understand why the police officer who choked Floyd had not been arrested.
“Why is the man who killed George Floyd not in jail? If you had done it, or I had done it, we would be behind bars right now,” Mayor Frey said.
As the protests continued in Minneapolis, Minnesota governor Tim Walz called out National Guard units on May 27, according to the twitter @RT_com.
In the rare even that a white police officer is arrested for killing a black person, the racist judicial system will exonerate the killer cop.
This happened in the murder of 18-year-old black youth, Michael Brown, by St Louis police officer, Darren Wilson in August 2016.
The grand jury hearing his case delivered the stunning verdict, three months later, to not indict Wilson.
The verdict led to thousands of people protesting in more than 90 cities across the US.
There was an equally racist verdict in the murder trial of three Baltimore police officers in 2016.
That case involved the death in a police van of a black suspect, 25-year-old Freddie Gray, in April 2015.
Gray was running away from the police but when arrested, he was thrown in a police van with hands and feet tied but without a seat belt.
During the high-speed erratic drive, Gray’s neck and spinal chord were broken.
He died in hospital a week later, on April 19, 2015.
Gray’s death, as that of countless other black men and women before him and since at the hands of abusive and trigger-happy police officers, led to widespread protests. The killing of black men has continued.
Baltimore State Attorney, Marilyn J. Mosby, herself black, appeared devastated at the decision to drop the charges despite fighting for a year to secure a conviction in a high profile police killing of another black man.
The decision meant nobody was held criminally accountable in Gray’s death.
“After much thought and prayer it has become clear that without being able to work with an independent investigatory agency from the very start, without having a say in the election of whether cases proceed in front of a judge or jury, without communal oversight of police in this community, without substantive reforms to the current criminal justice system, we could try this case 100 times and cases just like it and we would still end up with the same result,” State prosecutor Mosby said.
Even President Barack Obama admitted that the US criminal justice system was broken but was unable to fix it.
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