We should be asking this kind of question after every instance of police brutality. They need to be put on a tighter leash. Arresting the responsible policemen and charging them with a crime is a start…although even there, I expect our corrupt justice system would let them off eventually.
“Why is the man who killed George Floyd not in jail?” Frey asked. “If you had done it or I had done it, we would be behind bars right now.”
“We cannot turn a blind eye,” Frey said, calling on Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman to file charges against the officer two days after the incident.
There is also a security cam video at the link of the moments before he was murdered, in which he is dragged out of the car and put in handcuffs. He’s clearly unhappy and distressed and is passively resisting, but there’s nothing in his behavior that warrants police violence or murder.
When your country has, essentially, become a police state, you shouldn’t expect the police to be held to the same standards as civilians. Furthermore, you should expect many of the more privileged citizens and elected officials to afford the police undue trust and deference. In such a sorry state of affairs, corrupt police will have no compunction to brutalize and murder people in their custody especially if they’re non-white and/or poor.
I am saddened but not surprised by the way the protest and police response has progressed given the current climate. I feel if the officer had been arrested, as a citizen would have been, that the current escalation could have been avoided.
@2: That’s kind of the point- were police officers actually held to the same level of accountability as private citizens, there wouldn’t be all this tension and anger ready to boil over every time there’s an incident.
Yesterday, I saw an article in the Washington Post stating that being killed by police is the 6th leading cause of death among American men, ages 25-29, regardless of race. That’s just nuts.
Hm, 6th leading cause of death? I wonder if dying during “commission of a crime” is an excuse insurance companies use to avoid paying up, and how much money that saves them…
OK.
So if this guy was in handcuffs, how is he any danger to anyone?
What was the point of strangling him?
What was the point of strangling him?
The gentleman made multiple errors, including being black in handcuffs, being black in the presence of a goon, being an unarmed black person, being not yet lynched, … These indisputable offenses necessitated immediate execution-by-torture.
In no other civilised country could there be a “debate” about whether or not this was murder.
We basically need to eliminate qualified immunity doctrine. Anything short of that is not good enough. And that’s just a start to the fixes that we need.