Protests in Minneapolis and nationwide following George Floyd’s death

On Friday, the Department of Justice released a detailed report on civil rights abuses by the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD).

The report, which was spurred by the 2020 police murder of George Floyd and released just days before Juneteenth, finds that there is “reasonable cause” to believe that the MPD and the City of Minneapolis engaged in a “pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law.” That includes the use of excessive force and discrimination against Black and Native American people.

A year after George Floyd’s murder and the worldwide protests it sparked, more than half of US states have passed reform bills, altering policies like use of force, creating new rules about tracking misconduct, and mandating officer interventions during aggressive encounters. Major cities even made moves to aggressively reimagine policing.

Some of these changes have been tentative; some have been reversed; others have run up against lawsuits and backlash and red tape; some have been far less than what local protesters have called for. Changing policing, it has become apparent, will not be instantaneous or easy.

The first week of the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd, has been an emotional one. Witnesses who watched Chauvin pin the 46-year-old Black man by the neck with his knee described the trauma they had to live with afterward. They said they were upset and desperate to save Floyd’s life; several testified to calling the police on the police. Four of the witnesses on Tuesday were under 18 at the time of Floyd’s death — the youngest is now 9 — and testified with the cameras off, their voices wavering and sobbing as they narrated the nine minutes and 29 seconds they saw Floyd “fighting to breathe.”

Some of the most affecting testimonies came from 61-year-old bystander Charles McMillian, who broke down in tears after watching a replay of the body camera video of Floyd calling for his mom during the arrest, and Darnella Frazier, who recorded Floyd’s fatal arrest in a video that sparked a rallying cry on the streets.

A Minneapolis judge has dropped the third-degree murder charge against former police officer Derek Chauvin in the May killing of 46-year-old George Floyd that was captured on video and set off protests worldwide.

Chauvin’s attorneys filed a motion to have all charges against Chauvin dropped, but the judge sustained the higher charge of second-degree murder as well as the lower charge of second-degree manslaughter. Video of the killing shows Chauvin pinning Floyd to the ground by his neck with a knee for nearly nine minutes.

Next week, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden will face each other for the first time on the debate stage. Some of the most pressing problems of our time will be front and center: the coronavirus pandemic, the Supreme Court vacancy, and the fight for racial justice. So far, the candidates’ discussion of justice issues has focused less on how to address America’s longstanding inequity and more on how cities are facing a violent crime surge in a time of unrest — and who is to blame.

Trump and his supporters have repeatedly spoken of bringing “law and order” to Democrat-run cities that are full of “anarchy and mayhem,” even though racial justice protests around the country this summer have been mostly peaceful. Biden, on the other hand, has mostly skirted talk of unrest, emphasizing that the crime rate dropped while he was the vice president and that a surge of murders happened under Trump’s watch.

The release of video of the killing of Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old Black man, in Rochester, New York, is raising new questions about the use of law enforcement as ad hoc mental health specialists in light of calls to reform, defund, or abolish the police.

There is still an ongoing investigation into Prude’s death, which has led to the resignation of all of Rochester’s top police officials. Prude was stopped by police on March 23, early on in the coronavirus pandemic, after officers responded to a call about a naked man claiming he was infected with Covid-19. He was animated and appeared distressed during his arrest, and was ultimately pinned down by officers who’d placed a hood over his head until his cries of distress — and his movements — stopped. The video, released in early September, displays Prude’s final moments as captured by an officer’s body camera, and its delayed release prompted concerns of a cover-up.

On August 31, Dijon Kizzee, a Black man, was shot and killed as he fled from police in Los Angeles, California. On September 2, new video emerged of Daniel Prude, a Black man, being suffocated with a “spit hood” by police in Rochester, New York, earlier this spring. On August 18, Adrian Jason Roberts, a mentally ill Black Army veteran, was killed by police serving Roberts an involuntary commitment order in Cumberland County, North Carolina.

Since March 13 and the tragic killing of Breonna Taylor in her home in Louisville, Kentucky, the police have killed 83 Black people, according to the Washington Post. Other organizations put the total even higher: The Mapping Police Violence database notes more than 100 Black people killed by police since March 13.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden made a forceful denunciation this week of the property destruction that followed the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, saying “rioting is not protesting.”

“I want to make it absolutely clear, so I’m going to be very clear about all of this, rioting is not protesting,” he said. “Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting. It’s lawlessness, plain and simple.”

Fifty-seven years after Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the 1963 March on Washington, thousands of protesters for racial justice again gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC. It was an emotional day of protesting against police violence, the culmination of a summer of nationwide protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

Rev. Al Sharpton, who first announced the “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” March at Floyd’s funeral in June, spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, alongside the families of Black people who have been killed by police in recent memory.

On the granite steps of the Lincoln Memorial are carved two footprints. An inscription notes this spot was where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of thousands on August 28, 1963.

On Friday, amid a summer of protest against systemic racism and police violence, remarks will again be delivered from that same place by those speaking out against state violence.

This week’s Democratic National Convention roused more fuzzy feelings than a Hallmark movie.

From the heartwarming story of a teenager learning to manage his stutter to the endearing testament of Joe Biden finding love after losing his first wife and daughter in a car crash, the Democratic Party’s narrative arc inspired millions yearning for a return to American character and civility.

Sen. Kamala Harris has made history as the first Black woman to be selected for a major political party presidential ticket — but she’s also wading into a political quagmire. Harris’s record stands at odds with some of the most urgent racial justice issues today.

Her biography mirrors many of the Black women who anchor the Democratic Party’s base and who endure the brunt of America’s racism. Harris was born into a segregated United States, famously talking about her own experience with busing. Her parents organized in the civil rights movement. She attended a historically Black college. She belongs to a Black sorority. In symbolic virtue and stature, her candidacy already embodies the grandeur of electoral trailblazers like her friend Barack Obama and her muse Shirley Chisholm.

Cori Bush’s stunning primary upset over Rep. William Lacy Clay Jr. in Missouri’s First District underscored a generational split that has cracked through American electoral politics.

Over the last six years, the tension between the younger Black Lives Matter generation and the historic civil rights guard has been well documented as iconoclasts like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson clashed with younger activists over everything from movement objectives and speaking time to paying for protest permits and port-a-potties.

A silver minivan had been driving just ahead of a group of Black Lives Matter protesters in Manhattan Tuesday night when it came to a sudden stop. Five men in plain T-shirts and cargo shorts came pouring out of the vehicle and grabbed a young woman in the crowd off of her skateboard. They then violently placed her into the van, driving off, leaving surrounding protesters confused and upset about what just happened.

To some observers, it looked like a kidnapping; in video clips, protesters are seen surging forward, trying to intervene. Then, immediately, a group of about a dozen uniformed police on bikes circle the van to push people away.

President Donald Trump is upset that anti-racism and anti-police brutality protesters remain on the streets of America’s cities. He blames local leaders, mainly Democrats, for not doing enough to quell the unrest, which he typically portrays as far more violent than it really is.

Local and state officials should “dominate” violent protesters, he says, by using overwhelming force to deter anyone from countering law enforcement again. “You have to dominate or you’ll look like a bunch of jerks, you have to arrest and try people,” Trump told US governors on a June phone call. “You don’t have to be too careful.”

Oregon’s governor doesn’t want them. Oregon’s senators don’t want them. Portland’s mayor and city commissioners don’t want them. And Portland’s residents don’t want them.

And yet, at the urging of President Donald Trump, federal officers are roaming the streets of Oregon’s biggest city in unmarked vehicles, detaining protesters without identifying themselves.

Before she got sick with Covid-19, Deatric Edie typically left her house at 5:30 in the morning every day and wouldn’t get home until 1:30 or 2 in the morning, long after her family was asleep. She has worked in fast food her whole life to support her four children and now a grandchild, and even after the pandemic hit she worked several jobs: one at McDonald’s, another at Papa John’s, and a third at Wendy’s.

She’s a shift leader at McDonald’s but still makes just $9 an hour, even though she says some of her peers make $11. “Working three jobs, it’s not enough to cover rent, water, and food,” she said. “I still have to find another way to make those ends meet.” Sometimes that means there’s no food in the house. “I would go without eating to make sure my kids eat,” she said.

A recent political ad, sponsored by the conservative State Government Leadership Foundation, imagines the hellscape of a post-police Minneapolis. A terrified white woman jolts awake at 2 am during a home invasion. She alerts her husband. She grabs her phone. She calls the police. But it’s too late. They have all been defunded. A dispatcher informs her that a “human resources” specialist can’t help her right now as the camera pans over her sleeping child, the burglar advancing ominously. “Radical liberals are fighting for a police-free future,” the narrator intones. “Don’t let them put your family in danger.”

There is one thing — and only one thing — the ad gets right: On all sides, in all directions, the debate over the future of policing remains a debate over safety, driven by communities who desperately, deeply want to feel safe.

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican serving in the US Senate, has an additional, unenviable task beyond his usual legislative portfolio: talking to his colleagues, and Republicans in general, about the issues of race and policing with which he has an intimate familiarity.

“I, like many other Black Americans, have found myself choking on my own fears and disbelief when faced with the realities of an encounter with law enforcement,” he wrote in an op-ed in USA Today earlier this year, detailing experiences that began when he was 21 and have continued into his time in Congress.

It has been weeks since protests first erupted around the world in response to the killing of George Floyd and police brutality. They stand out as notably larger and more widespread than other protests against racist killings in recent years as the Black Lives Matter movement has gained visibility. Over the past month, marches have taken place in more than 40 countries and 2,000 American cities, compared with 100 US cities in 2013 following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Black teen Trayvon Martin.

Perhaps most striking is that this time, in the middle of a pandemic, there were more white participants than in previous Black Lives Matter protests. “It felt like I needed to do more than just try to make change through my teaching,” Tim, a 27-year-old white teacher in Seattle, told Vox. (Names have been changed throughout to protect the anonymity of the protesters.)

People have been protesting in the streets around the country and around the world in response to the brutal, cellphone-recorded killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a Minneapolis police officer during an arrest. This might feel like tragic déjà vu: another Black American killed by police, followed by another wave of protests to demand accountability.

It turns out it’s difficult to count exactly how many times we’ve seen this before, because data on police killings in the United States isn’t easy to come by. The government hasn’t historically tracked this public health statistic. In the wake of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown Jr., Congress passed the Death in Custody Reporting Act, which would enable and mandate police departments to report deaths. The intent was to better understand how to prevent these tragedies. But as of today, there is still no reporting system in place for this data collection, nor are there consequences for failing to report these numbers. In other words, official data on police killings still doesn’t exist.

A shooting at a protest in Louisville, Kentucky’s Jefferson Square Park resulted in one death and one injury Saturday night, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.

The park has been the epicenter of ongoing protests against police brutality and racism, sparked by a series of police killings, including of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville. Several protesters had set up tents and were staying overnight in the park.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday directing federal law enforcement agencies to prosecute people who damage federal monuments — and to withhold portions of federal funding to cities that don’t protect statues from demonstrators.

The order marks the latest in Trump’s ongoing battle against protesters who have pushed for the removal of monuments and statues that memorialize Confederate leaders, and other figures who supported slavery, white supremacy, or colonialism. Several monuments have been torn down or removed in recent weeks amid protests against police brutality and racism, including statues of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Alabama and Confederate Gen. Albert Pike in Washington, DC.

The circumstances of Elijah McClain’s death are as horrifying as any of the killings now infamous in the age of Black Lives Matter. Last year, McClain lost his life less than a week after encountering police on a walk home in Aurora, Colorado. McClain, who was anemic, regularly wore a ski mask because he quickly grew cold. Last August, a resident spotted him wearing his mask while returning home from the store, called the police, and reported him as “sketchy.”

According to video from body camera footage and news reports, when officers arrived, they immediately marched up to McClain and accosted him. McClain grew tense as officers grabbed and restrained him. During the altercation, officers placed McClain in a chokehold, threatened to have him bitten by their police dog, and deliberately obstructed the view of their body cameras, all while McClain pleaded for help, begged for forgiveness, and explained he meant no one any harm.

A few weeks ago, Christina Wairegi, 29, a cinematographer, and Tiffany Armour, 37, a digital imaging technician, were complete strangers. Their only connection was a mutual friend in the film industry who recommended that Tiffany followed Christina on Instagram.

Then, when the killing of George Floyd sparked worldwide protests, Tiffany saw that Christina was asking her friends over Instagram Stories to chip in so she could buy supplies for protesters. Tiffany DMed Christina to donate $100 — and to offer up her van to help move water, snacks, and PPE to protest sites. Neither were working with organizers or specific organizations, but were looking for ways they could help out.