[ Exclusive: three years after murder, Minnesota congresswoman
talks prison abuse and her new police violence resolution]
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ILHAN OMAR CONDEMNS US FAILURE TO ACT SINCE GEORGE FLOYD: ‘A BROKEN
SYSTEM’  
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Sam Levin
May 3, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Exclusive: three years after murder, Minnesota congresswoman talks
prison abuse and her new police violence resolution _

Ilhan Omar has condemned the United States’ failure to curb police
violence in an interview with the Guardian: ‘We are not in a good
place.’ , Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

 

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar
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States’ failure to curb police violence, saying in an interview with
the Guardian that brutality against Black Americans had escalated
since George Floyd’s murder.

“Regardless of the heightened scrutiny and spotlight on
state-sanctioned violence on to Black bodies, it still continues to
happen at the same rate, if not higher,” the Democratic
representative said on Tuesday. “We are not in a good place.”

Omar spoke by phone from Minnesota on Tuesday after a United Nations
human rights group visited her district as part of a two-week tour of
US cities
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on police killings and racism in the US criminal legal system
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The UN experts heard emotional testimony in Minneapolis from families
of people killed by police and formerly incarcerated people who were
subject to solitary confinement as youth and continue to suffer from
the trauma.

On Wednesday, Omar is also proposing a House resolution condemning
police brutality worldwide, calling for reallocating funding in the US
toward mental health programs, counseling and violence prevention;
ending the use of militarized equipment and police tactics in the US
and abroad; and prohibiting the sales of arms, ammunition and
“less-lethal” equipment to countries with documented human rights
violations.

“The United States has always professed these values of human rights
and rarely subjects itself in the scrutiny of these systems that we
support internationally,” said Omar, the deputy chair of the
congressional progressive caucus, who has championed criminal justice
reforms. The representative, a frequent target of Republicans
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rightwing media, has previously introduced legislation to
criminalize violence against protesters
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investigate police misuse of force
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to restrict the use of no-knock warrants
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Floyd’s murder and the 2021 police killing of Daunte Wright
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the 20-year-old who was pulled over for having an expired tag and
hanging air freshener
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both occurred in Omar’s district. At the State of the Union address
this year, the congresswoman brought as her guest the father of Amir
Locke
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a 22-year-old who was asleep on a couch when Minneapolis police barged
into the apartment in a pre-dawn raid
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killed him within seconds
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As Minneapolis braces for the third anniversary of Floyd’s murder
this month, advocates’ data analysis has shown that police in the US
continue to kill more than three people a day, and that 2022 was
the deadliest year
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record since experts first started doing nationwide tracking in 2013.

“It’s dangerous to continue to make the same mistakes and invest
in systems that are not only broken, but do not serve the needs of the
community,” said Omar, criticizing the “tough on crime” rhetoric
that has increased in recent years as lawmakers roll back reforms
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seek to expand police powers. “We know what will work and what is
needed. Research and data points to all these other interventions
being much more meaningful in reducing crime than what we see when we
continue to invest just in policing.”

[A line of police in riot gear stands before a group of peaceful
protesters.]

A protest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Critics say little
has changed in the three years since, with police killings still
frequent in the US. Photograph: China News Service/Getty Images

She said non-policing efforts can be more effective, pointing toward a
$500,000 US justice department grant
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Minnesota gun violence prevention program that provides trauma
recovery services to victims through hospitals, in an effort to break
cycles of shootings. “We’ve seen the drastic changes that are
experienced by the few people served by the gun violence prevention
programs that are funded.”

Mothers whose sons were killed by police in Minnesota testified on
Tuesday about the horrors of law enforcement instantly using deadly
force on their loved ones in crisis, then aggressively defending the
killings.

The formerly incarcerated witnesses talked to the UN about being
locked alone in small cells for hours or days on end, their cries for
help ignored. A recent new investigation found that solitary
confinement of children continued to be a widespread practice
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Minnesota.

“The inhumanity of the human rights violations … is baffling,”
Omar said. “We have staggering numbers of people who are dying
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our prisons and who are living in the most inhumane conditions. We
have staggering levels of people struggling with mental health who are
being denied access
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healthcare that they deserve. We’re seeing people who are being
driven to insanity because we seem to lack the compassion of
understanding that human beings need interaction.”

She noted that some in solitary are deprived of all human contact,
blankets and a proper place to sleep, amounting to “torture”. In
recent weeks, there have been reports of deaths in US jails, including
a man in Indiana with schizophrenia who was left naked
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solitary for weeks, and a man with mental illness who was
found covered in bedbugs
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“The fact we’re allowing young, developing brains with so much
potential … to be confined in solitary is just horrendous,” Omar
said, adding that the US prison system remained focused on punishment
and not on preparing people to return home: “These are things that
shouldn’t be happening anywhere in the world, and certainly
shouldn’t be happening in the United States.”

The UN experts
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part of a human rights panel formed after Floyd’s murder, are also
visiting Washington DC, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. In
LA, the group toured the county jail system
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which has been condemned for its squalid and “barbaric”
conditions. The panel will present a report on its findings to the UN
later this year.

_Sam Levin is a correspondent for Guardian US, based in Los
Angeles. Click here
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Sam's public key. Twitter @SamTLevin
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* police brutality
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* George Floyd
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* police reform
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* Ilhan Omar
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