The jurors have begun deliberating in the George Floyd trial. In closing statements, the prosecution urged jurors: “Believe your eyes. What you saw, you saw.”
From today's NYT newsletter:
"Since George Floyd’s death last May, dozens of states and local governments have changed their laws about police behavior. And yet police officers continue to kill about three Americans each day on average, nearly identical to the rate of police killings for as long as statistics exist.
Which raises the question: Are the latest efforts to change policing — to make it less violent, especially for Black and Latino Americans — destined to fail?
Not necessarily, many experts say. They believe the recent changes are meaningful. They will probably fall well short of solving the country’s problem with needlessly violent police behavior. But the changes still appear to be substantial, even if they will take some time to have a noticeable effect.
“You actually can get a lot of common ground between police critics and police themselves,” Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor and former reserve police officer in Washington, told us. “There are plenty of places where those conversations seem to be occurring in a preliminary way.”
That common ground extends to public opinion. Most Americans disagree with sweeping criticisms of the police, like the calls to abolish police departments. (Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic congresswoman from Michigan, wrote last week on Twitter: “No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can’t be reformed.”) Recent polls show that most Americans say they generally trust the police, and few if any mayors, governors, congressional leaders or top members of the Biden administration share Tlaib’s view.
But many politicians and most voters do favor changes to policing, like banning chokeholds and racial profiling or mandating police body cameras. “Americans — both Democrats and Republicans — want some sort of reform,” Alex Samuels of FiveThirtyEight wrote.
The recent policy changes fit into two main categories. The first is a set of limits on the use of force. Sixteen states have restricted the use of so-called neck restraints, like Derek Chauvin’s use of his knee on Floyd’s neck. And 21 additional cities now require officers to intervene when they think another officer is using excessive force.
The changes have mostly been in Democratic-leaning states, but not entirely: Kentucky has limited no-knock warrants, which played a role in Breonna Taylor’s death, while Indiana, Iowa and Utah have restricted neck restraints. (Republican legislators in some states are pushing bills that go in the other direction, by strengthening penalties for people who injure officers, for instance, or by preventing cities from cutting police budgets.)
The second category involves police accountability. Several states have mandated the use of body cameras. Colorado, New Mexico, Massachusetts and Connecticut have made it easier for citizens to sue police officers, as has New York City.
In Maryland, David Moon, a state legislator, said that the recent changes were “just light-years beyond” those enacted after Freddie Gray died in the custody of Baltimore police six years ago. The new laws “basically blew up the old system and tried to create a new structure for discipline,” Moon told The Washington Post.
One significant part of the policy changes: States are enacting them, forcing local police departments to abide by them. “States had given great leeway to local jurisdictions to decide how to police themselves,” The Times’s Michael Keller told us. “Now, states are starting to take more control.”
It’s too early to know whether all of the attention on policing after Floyd’s death will amount to widespread changes. “Police organizations have an amazing ability to resist change when there’s no real buy-in from the rank and file,” Brooks said. But there does seem to be a greater recognition of what policing has in common with virtually every other human endeavor: It works better when it includes clear standards and outside accountability.
“What we’ve seen since George Floyd’s death — and really since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 — is a widespread acknowledgment that law enforcement needs new rules and policies,” my colleague John Eligon, who has covered policing extensively, said. “But there is still a great frustration among many activists and community members I talk to who say that the changes do not go nearly far enough.”
He added: “They see tinkering around the edges that does not really change the culture of police departments or solve the big problem: that police in America are still killing people every day.”
POEM(S): Why I don’t write about George Floyd by Toi Derricotte
Because there is too much to say
Because I have nothing to say
Because I don’t know what to say
Because everything has been said
Because it hurts too much to say
What can I say what can I say
Something is stuck in my throat
Something is stuck like an apple
Something is stuck like a knife
Something is stuffed like a foot
Something is stuffed like a body
Poem with an Ear Pressed to the Ground by Kindra McDonald
That it would come down
to the science of breathing
how the lungs receive oxygen
how a pulse becomes stilled
that it would come down
to the compression of an airway
somewhere between the diameter
of a quarter and a dime
shallow breaths the equivalent
of surgical removal of the left lung
trying to breathe with fingers and knuckles
under the force of 90 pounds of pressure
like sipping air through a drinking straw
that it would come down to 12 peers
in chairs palpating their own throats
to feel the pulse beneath their probing
fingers, the tender skin indent
the metric beat of pumping blood
an ear pressed to the ground
prone and pleading
all of us needing the one
who we all came from
who held her breath
spent and waiting
for a newborn to cry
to breathe with life.
[Kindra McDonald: “So much of this last year has been about breath and breathing. The transmission of an unseen virus, the breath of contagion, the respirators and intubations of packed ICU patients, but amidst all of that a reel of “I can’t breathe.” Three words that have for too long been linked to violent restraint. As the Chauvin murder trail in the death of George Floyd plays out, I’ve been struck by the breath we all share. The image of the jurors feeling their necks for the airway that was obstructed has haunted me and this poem is that ghost.”]
QUOTE: "We need to statutize what is permissible and what is not permissible. If a law enforcement agent uses a clearly unapproved technique like the knee that was on the neck of George Floyd for over eight minutes, no law enforcement agent thinks that that's right and that officer should be held accountable." ~ Cal Cunningham
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