CovOps
Location : Ether-Sphere Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator Humor : Über Serious
| Subject: The George Floyd Killing in Minneapolis Exposes the Failures of poLICE Reform Sat May 30, 2020 11:05 pm | |
| As protests over the police killing of George Floyd engulfed Minneapolis for a third night on Thursday, and solidarity protests broke out in cities across the country, there was both a sense that the country had been through this before — too many times — and that the stakes had begun to shift.
In the Twin Cities, where Floyd’s killing at the hands of officer Derek Chauvin was just the latest in a series of high-profile police killings in the last five years, those who took to the streets in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic were tired and exasperated. Years of misconduct and brutality by local police had brought many protests and much talk of reform. But Floyd’s death was an urgent reminder that here, as across the country, police reform had failed, and that the time had come for something different. “They call for training, but are they doing the training, and is the training being internalized?” said Moriah Stephens, a special education teacher, as she stood near a highway overpass in St. Louis Park, the suburb where Floyd had lived, waving as passing cars honked in support. “I can tell you 50 times over that my life matters and I would like you to speak out about the fact that my life matters, and you can hear me say that 50 times, but are you going to do it?”
“I’m tired of being angry, and I’m tired of being tired, and I’m tired of seeing new hashtags,” she added, referring to a recent wave of police killings and other racist incidents across the country. “I’m lucky I’m alive. I can stand here. I can shout. There’s part of me that’s like, I need to use what I have — I have my life and I need to use it, but I’m also tired of doing that.”
Stephens, who had joined protests after the police killings of Philando Castile in a Minneapolis suburb in 2016, said her father was currently undergoing chemotherapy treatment. She was reluctant to go out in the middle of a Covid-19 outbreak that had already taken nearly 1,000 lives in Minnesota, and like many protesters was wearing a mask and standing at a distance from others. “I’m not supposed to be around people. But that’s where I’m at.”
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/george-floyd-minneapolis-police-reform/
_________________ Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband “The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner "Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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