George Floyd, still an open wound

The suffering of Floyd until he died was recorded on video. His cry for help, “I can’t breathe”, while police officer

Derek Chauvin asphyxiated him, became the slogan of mass protests in the United States. The murder happened 5 years ago in Minneapolis, a city in Minnesota, but many people feel that real justice has not been done.

Protest is progress – Kil the Bill. Photo by Alisdare Hickson / Flickr. Creative Commons License.

Chauvin was convicted of Floyd’s murder and sentenced to twenty-two-and-a-half years in jail. It was the first conviction in Minnesota of a white police officer for the murder of an Afro-American.

The murder of Floyd on 25^th May 2020 and, two months earlier, on 13^th March, that of Breonna Taylor – shot in her flat in Louisville (Kentucky) – sparked a wave of national indignation.

Joe Biden’s administration brought in measures in an attempt to reform police departments involved in deaths that generated large-scale national protests only comparable here with the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s. Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara, who took the role in November 2022, two years after Floyd’s death, is continuing to implement internal changes that lead to safer streets and more positive interactions with the city’s police.

However, O’Hara has said that Floyd’s death remains an “open wound” in the city and although police data shows a drop in shootings, Minneapolis is one of the few major cities where violent crime has not improved much since 2020.

Crime in the city rocketed following Floyd’s death and the subsequent protests, says O’Hara, while “police numbers simply fell”.

Biden’s government sought to agree reforms with law-enforcement agencies about the abuse of lethal force, unconstitutional police conduct and civil rights violations. But now the Department of Justice (DoJ) has put an end to what it calls “Biden’s Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment at tying the hands of local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees”. Assistant attorney general Harmeet K. Dhillon of the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement that these decrees are excessively broad and strip communities of the control of local policing that they should have.

This step by the Department of Justice will dismiss the Louisville and Minneapolis lawsuits and close the underlying investigations into their police departments. It will also retract the Biden administration’s conclusions of constitutional violations, according to local media.

Reports suggest that the DoJ will also close its investigations and reverse the conclusions on constitutional violations by the local police forces in Phoenix, Arizona, Trenton, New Jersey, Memphis, Tennessee, Mount Vernon, New York, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and the Louisiana State Police.