Minneapolis police continued to use excessive force and engage in racial discrimination after the killing of George Floyd by one of their officers, according to an official report released Friday.
Law enforcement in this northern U.S. city “frequently use excessive force,” including lethal force, and “unlawfully discriminate against Black and Native American people,” the Justice Department wrote in a report. damning investigation.
“To the credit of police and city officials, significant changes have been introduced” since the tragedy, but “there is still work to be done,” Justice Minister Merrick Garland said, presenting 28 recommendations.
Local and federal authorities will now negotiate an agreement on the reforms to be undertaken, the implementation of which will be subject to the supervision of a court, he said during a press conference organized in Minneapolis.
On May 25, 2020, white police officer Derek Chauvin suffocated black George Floyd in his forties by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. His agony, filmed by a passerby and posted online, sparked huge protests across the United States.
“His death had an irrevocable impact on Minneapolis, our country and the whole world”, underlined the minister who, shortly after his appointment by Democratic President Joe Biden, had launched an investigation to determine whether, beyond individual acts , there was a structural problem in the police of this city of 425,000 inhabitants, among the most unequal in the United States.
” To punish “
For two years, its investigators pored over reports of incidents between 2016 and August 2022, studied footage from police cameras and heard from thousands of witnesses. And their conclusions, gathered in an 89-page document, are final.
“Many police officers do their difficult work with professionalism, courage and respect. Nonetheless, our investigation concluded that systemic issues made possible what happened to George Floyd,” they write in the introduction.
“For years, the Minneapolis police have used dangerous techniques and weapons against people who have committed only minor offenses or no offense,” they note, referring in particular to the choke keys – now banned.
Officers sometimes use their service weapon for no reason, they also note, giving the example of a man in police custody who began cutting his throat with a knife and was fired at by two officers at four occasions.
They “use force to punish people who make them angry or who criticize them,” the authors of the report still assert, deploring the use of tear gas or rubber bullets on demonstrators or journalists.
“Cowboys”
In addition, they “patrol the neighborhoods in different ways according to their ethnic composition”, with “cowboys” volunteering to go to the predominantly African-American borough.
“Data shows that in non-arrest situations, Minneapolis officers screen black and Native American people six times more than white people,” Merrick Garland said.
However, since the death of George Floyd, the agents often conceal the ethnicity of the people with whom they interact in their reports, “which makes it more difficult to detect and counter discrimination”.
Finally, the police too often remain deployed in the event of a crisis of dementia, although they are not equipped to calm the sick, which often results in violence, regret the authors of the report.
At the structural level, impunity reigns, they further write: the system of internal controls is “an opaque labyrinth, with many dead ends, so that many justified complaints are dismissed without investigation or clear reason. “.
All this at a cost for the city: firstly because it complicates relations with the population and makes the police less effective. Then because the city had to pay 61.5 million dollars between 2016 and 2022 to put an end to civil lawsuits against its agents.