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Protest against police terror across the United States over the last two weeks is beginning to produce change. George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police drove hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people into the streets, demanding both justice for Floyd and other victims of the police, and fundamental change to policing itself. “Defund the Police,” is being heard coast to coast from people tired of the cycle of police violence, protest, promised reform, and then... nothing. In Minneapolis, a supermajority of the city council has committed to dismantling the Minneapolis Police Department.
“We haven’t seen a moment like this in at least half a century,” said Harvard professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of “The Condemnation of Blackness,” speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, “with protesters taking to the streets to demand, once and for all, not just police reform and accountability, but the prospect of a new vision of a relationship between state authorities and the health of a community.”
In Minneapolis, four officers face prosecution for George Floyd’s murder. But the public wants more than convictions, which, in themselves, are far from certain according to Minnesota’s first African American Attorney General Keith Ellison. Ellison took charge of the prosecution over concerns that the county prosecutor had a pro-police bias. After decades of impunity, violence against residents, and ... Read More →
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