17 Days of protesting have gone by.
And that simply isn’t enough to tackle 401 years of injustice.
Or 316 years of police brutality.
Or the 91 years of Jim Crow.
Or a mother's child.
Let’s paint the image.
On a Monday in Minneapolis, a black man enters a corner store to do what you and I do. The man walks to the cashier area, seeing a clerk that has only been present for 6 months, and prepares to purchase a pack of cigarettes. After handing over the $20 bill, the store clerk holds suspicion that it may be counterfeit. So simply “following procedure”, the young clerk calls the police.
Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, the owner of the corner store “Cup Foods”, stated that “As a check-cashing business, the store is required to call the police for suspected forgeries so the fake bill can potentially be traced to its origin”. However, amongst the community Mahmoud is not known for calling the police. In actuality, he encourages his employees to report to him so they may handle it directly without police involvement, with the only exception being violence.
But this time was different. Why?
Minutes pass and J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane are on the scene, handcuffs jingling in their back pockets. Together, they apprehend the man, laying him on his stomach. Both officers were new additions to the Minneapolis Police Department; Lane on his fourth day and Kueng on his third shift, training under the infamous Derek Chauvin who is to come a few minutes later.
The presence of Derek Chauvin marks the descent of George Floyd’s life. Derek would later place his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, while his cries for breath are drowned out by the weight of Chauvin’s apathy. He cries for his mother…his dead mother, to hear his desperation. Then, his body goes limp. With that, another life is taken and added to the list of many other homicides that aren’t reported.
I knew the video would be too painful for me to watch, so I refuse to do so til this day.
In 1994, Congress enacted the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Did you know that under Subtitle D: Police Pattern or Practice in section 210402 it states that the “Attorney General [is] to acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers and to publish an annual summary of such data”?
So where is it? Where's the data?
The Justice Department deemed data retrieval too "difficult" in their 1996 report "…given the lack of standard definitions, the variety of incident recording practices, and the sensitivity of the issue". So rather than enforce this bill with an iron fist, the Justice Department concluded that in order to “improve [their] knowledge of police use of force” they would retrieve this info by surveys.
So tell me how y’all gonna survey a dead man’s perspective because I’d love to know.
I strongly urge you to pause reading this and move towards this link. USA today contains information regarding how the Justice Department “…issued a report [Policing and Homicide, 1976–1998: Justifiable Homicide by Police, Police Officers Murdered by Felons] that effectively presumed that anyone who was gunned down by police deserved to die”.
I’d also like to point out one thing I learned from the USA today article. “Our forever president” (a phrase coined by “TheShadeRoom”) Barack Obama, while I appreciate and love him, was not able to get things done at times. Following Ferguson back in 2014, Congress enacted the Death in Custody Reporting Act to which his Justice Department did not follow through with proposing regulations until 2016. Then on top of that, they provided no penalties for police departments that did not comply with truthful evidence of their statistics.
Crazy how accountability is avoided isn’t it?
I can’t help but draw my mind back to the Democrats wearing kente cloth (Ghanians and other West Africans alike were def rolling their eyes because the colors have meanings behind them…and the ones they wore were the wrong ones. Don’t think “celebration and marriage” was the right choice!!!) and their performative activism the day they kneeled for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Don’t get me wrong, it was an act of solidarity… but the black community is past the point of “acts”. We need action. We need penalties. We need regulation, enforceable ones. They already had existing acts that were just not pushed by the Justice Department. I’m sure it’s a lot more intricate than this explanation I’m providing you, but I genuinely believe that with the bills and links I provided, it’s enough for you to question how…and why this has been allowed to continue.
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