Murder of George Floyd | Violence and racism remain recurrent within the Minneapolis police

(Minneapolis) Minneapolis police continued to use excessive force and racially discriminate 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 Indigenous 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 Secretary Merrick Garland told a news conference. .

The report includes 28 recommendations and local and federal authorities will now negotiate a reform plan, the implementation of which will be subject to court supervision, he said from Minneapolis.

Democratic President Joe Biden, who had promised during his campaign to reform the police without achieving it, called the report “disturbing”. He again called on Congress to legislate, with little chance of being heard.

On May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, white policeman Derek Chauvin had asphyxiated black forty-something George Floyd 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.

Nearly a year later, the Justice Department had launched an investigation to determine if, beyond individual acts, there was a structural problem in the police of this city of 425,000 inhabitants, among the most unequal of the States. -United.

” To punish ”

For two years, its investigators pored over reports of incidents between 2016 and 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.

“For years, the Minneapolis police have used dangerous techniques and weapons against people who have committed only minor offenses, or no offense at all”, they note, referring in particular to the choke keys – now banned.

Officers sometimes use their service weapon for no reason, or in a dangerous manner on moving cars, they also note.

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.

“Minneapolis officers check black and indigenous people six times more than white people,” without making any arrests, Merrick Garland said.

According to the report, since the death of George Floyd, officers often fail to specify the ethnicity of suspects in their reports “making it more difficult to detect and counter discrimination”.

Finally, the police are too often deployed in the event of a crisis of dementia, although they are not equipped to calm the sick, regret its authors.

At the structural level, the internal control system is “an opaque maze, with many dead ends, so that many justified complaints are dismissed”, they continue.

All this at a cost: 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.

To fight against this violence and discrimination, the authors of the report recommend clear rules, reinforced training, or even more control.

Attorney Ben Crump, who had defended the Floyd family, however, expressed in a statement “his skepticism about Minneapolis’s desire to change”.