The police killings continue

You would think that with the recent events following the murder of George Floyd, police in the US would be more cautious, at least for a while, about using deadly force. You would be wrong, because in the US, the culture of the police shooting first for the slightest reason is so strong as to be almost an instinct. Look at what happened yesterday in Vallejo, CA.

Police in northern California fatally shot an unarmed 22-year-old who was on his knees with his hands up outside a Walgreens store while responding to a call of alleged looting, officials said.

An officer in the city of Vallejo was inside his car when he shot Sean Monterrosa on Monday night amid local and national protests against police brutality. Police said an officer mistakenly believed Monterrosa had a gun, but later determined he had a hammer in his pocket.
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The police are often the problem, not the solution

The video of the NYPD police cruisers running over demonstrators has been viewed over 30 million times. That video only reinforced an image of a police department that has long engaged in lawless behavior with impunity.

Though that sentiment applies nationwide, Adams believes New York stands out as having a “horrible history of police brutality”. It was the NYPD that set the tone, she said, when Daniel Pantaleo, the officer implicated in the 2014 death by chokehold of Eric Garner in Staten Island, avoided prosecution.

“When nothing happened to the police officers who were responsible for the death of Eric Garner, New York set the blueprint for what happened to George Floyd,” she said. “There’s no penalty, no consequence, so it’s OK.”

Adams’s framing of the Garner killing could equally be applied to a long string of notorious episodes of police misconduct that preceded it. In 1997, Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was handcuffed by an NYPD officer and sexually assaulted with a broken broomstick.

Two years later, Amadou Diallo was shot near his home in a hail of 41 bullets after officers mistook his wallet for a gun. In an echo of that event, an unarmed Sean Bell was shot 50 times in Queens on the morning of his wedding in 2006 – it took six years for the NYPD detective who opened the fusillade to be chucked off the force while nobody has ever been convicted of any crime.
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Fake news is all over the place

The recent events have resulted in a lot of fake news circulating on the internet by people trying to paint the demonstrations in the worst possible light. People have been using clips of fires from the past have been posted suggesting that these were part of the current demonstrations. A news reporter said of hearing of some protests in Oakland, CA becoming unruly and so he contacted another reporter whom he knew was on the scene to ask what was going on and being told that the people were doing the electric slide. (You can listen at the 17:50 mark of this program.)

This unruliness seems to be catching on elsewhere.

A must-see video from Hasan Minhaj

Hasan Minhaj has a special episode where he lets loose his outrage at what has happened as a result of the George Floyd murder. During this 12-minutes clip, he also takes the Asian community to task for our hypocrisy and racism, taking advantage of all the benefits that we got because of the civil rights struggle led by the black community at great cost, while sitting on the sidelines or condemning the protests when the black community reacts to being under siege.

He does not mince his words. His anger is palpable. He speaks the truth.

Incidentally, Minhaj must have made this earlier yesterday because later in the day Minnesota state attorney general Keith Ellison did exactly what Minhaj urged him to do. He upgraded the murder charge against Derek Chauvin from third-degree murder to second-degree murder and charged the other three police officers on the scene with aiding and abetting second-degree murder. All four are now in custody.

“Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide”

Matthew Dessem writes that the above should have been the headline for the events of the past few days, not headlines ascribing the violence to the demonstrators.

The ongoing protests following the killing of George Floyd were caught up in violence again on Saturday, as police all over the country tear-gassed protesters, drove vehicles through crowds,opened fire with nonlethal rounds on journalists or people on their own property, and in at least one instance, pushed over an elderly man who was walking away with a cane. Here are some of the ways law enforcement officers escalated the national unrest.

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Mail-in voting

For some reason, Trump and the Republicans are dead set against mail-in voting, constantly repeating some crackpot theory about how it will lead to massive fraud though studies have repeatedly shown that voting fraud in the US is almost non-existent and that committing such fraud with mail-in ballots is not only hard to pull off but the reward is hardly worth the risk of a felony prosecution.

I think that their opposition is based more on the general attitude of Republicans that making voting harder will discourage poor and minority communities from voting, which is their only hope of clinging on to power, hence all their attempts at making voting more onerous in so many ways. But in the case of mail-in voting they may be hurting their own cause more, since the older white people that make up so much of their base are more likely to want to mail in their ballots.
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The pandemic has not been the CDC’s finest hour

One of the things that this pandemic has revealed is how diminished the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) has become. This organization was once highly respected around the world and should have been front and center during the crisis because it has the expertise and resources to marshal all the information and provide guidance to the public. The experts from the CDC should have been the people holding daily press conferences, calling upon other experts in the field of infectious disease like Anthony Fauci who heads the Infectious Diseases division of the National Institutes of Health.
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Why there is so much police brutality in the US

In discussing with my relatives (almost all of whom live outside the US) about the current unrest in the US following the murder of George Floyd, I realized that many of them did not quite understand how deeply warped the US criminal (in)justice system is from the top to the bottom and so I thought I would try and explain how it got to be that way for the benefit of this blog’s readers who also live outside the US.

One question that was raised is why the people who recorded Floyd’s murder did not step in and try to stop it, when so many people are willing to confront police by taking part in demonstrations against the death. There is a world of difference between taking part in a large demonstration protesting police brutality and challenging, on your own, four American police officers during the course of that brutality. With demonstrations there is some safety in numbers. When large numbers of people protest, the chance that the police will shoot YOU is small.
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George Floyd’s last words

I could not watch the entire video of George Floyd being slowly killed by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. I had to stop it after a very short time because it was so disturbing. I had not realized that Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, an incredibly long time. Floyd became non-responsive after about six minutes and at that point, at the urging of the crowd that was at the scene, another police officer checked for, but could not find, a pulse but Chauvin continued to keep his knee on his neck. The BBC has published a time line of the 30 minutes before George Floyd’s murder.
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