‘I can’t breathe’: rage in Minneapolis and an officer charged with murder
WASHINGTON — “I can’t breathe.”
Eric Garner uttered those words six years ago, locked in a police chokehold.
It became a rallying cry after his death for demonstrators across the country who protested the killings of African Americans by police.
Then came the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump. As the political divide widened, so much competed for the nation’s attention — Russian interference in the election, debates over immigration, and impeachment — and with a new Justice Department shifting civil rights priorities, the moment slowly faded from the national stage.
Until this week. George Floyd uttered the exact same words, while handcuffed and pinned at the neck under the knee of a white police officer, galvanizing the movement anew and prompting mass protests around the country.
“There is something happening at this moment,” said activist Carmen Perez. “It’s not that the police killings stopped, it’s just that we were refocusing our direction toward Donald Trump because we also felt this need to come together to call him out.”
It’s possible, though, with the United States just emerging from weeks of stayat-home orders imposed to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, people have fewer distractions and can refocus on the issue, she said.
The swift firing of the officers involved, the empathetic response from the Minneapolis mayor who also called for criminal charges, and the unusual public criticism of the officer’s actions from law enforcement nationwide have done nothing to quell the anger or calls for justice.
That’s in part because killings continue to happen. Floyd’s death came after Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed in Georgia by a former district attorney investigator and his son, who were not arrested until after video emerged months later. And an EMT in Kentucky, Breonna Taylor, was killed in March when three officers entered her apartment by force to serve a search warrant in a narcotics investigation.
“This has been going on for way too many years, and it is time for a change,” said Erika Atson, protesting in Minneapolis Thursday. “Because we are tired.”
The protests that began with chanting and marching in Minneapolis the day after the disturbing video emerged that showed Floyd pinned for eight minutes have grown to mass demonstrations, some violent, in Minnesota and around the country.
Lawmakers across the U.S. are again talking about how to prevent such deaths in the future. Outrage over the images of Floyd’s last moments even came from those who have a history of defending police, including Trump.
Civil-rights attorneys in the three recent cases said what inspires the anger is, in part, that authorities initially propagated narratives that Arbery, Taylor and Floyd were responsible for their own deaths before video and 911 calls showed otherwise. “There is a false narrative … put out there,” said civil-rights attorney Benjamin Crump.
In the years before the 2016 election, though, it felt like policing was shifting.
The mothers of some of the men killed by police attended the Democratic National Convention. The Justice Department frequently criticized violent police confrontations and opened a series of civil rights investigations into local law enforcement practices. But after Trump was elected, it shifted. Former attorney general Jeff Sessions ordered a review of consent decrees, legal agreements meant to effect change, that the Obama-era Justice Department had used to fight police misconduct, in part over a belief that the Democratic administration had vilified the police. The decrees included those with the police in Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of Michael Brown and in Baltimore after the police custody death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray.
Hours before he resigned as attorney general in November 2018, Sessions signed a memo that scaled back the practice, making consent decrees more difficult to enact.