On May 26, people took to the Minneapolis streets in masks to protest the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old local black man. The incident, caught on a bystander’s cell phone camera, shows Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.In Minneapolis, police use force against black people at 7 times the rate of whites. And 1 in every 1000 black men can be expected to be killed by police...that’s 2 ½ times more likely than white Americans.These statistics are no coincidence.
The killing of unarmed Black men and women in the streets, in their cars, in their own homes is not just the product of occasional racist bad apples. Instead, a well-built and well-funded system not only offers protection to racist police behavior, but in many cases, encourages it.
This system spans centuries, and has a network that runs through all areas of city state and federal governments. It’s a system that still works just as it was originally intended...to keep Black Americans from ever feeling or being safe.
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