MINNEAPOLIS MAYOR: KNEELING COP SHOULD BE CHARGED IN DEATH OF GEORGE FLOYD
MINNEAPOLIS — The mayor of Minneapolis called Wednesday for criminal charges to be filed against the white police officer seen on video kneeling against the neck of a handcuffed black man who complained that he could not breathe and died in police custody.
Based on the video, Mayor Jacob Frey said Officer Derek Chauvin should be charged in the death of George Floyd. The footage recorded by a bystander shows Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck for several minutes as Floyd gasps for breath on the ground with his face against the pavement.
An employee at a grocery store had called police after Floyd allegedly tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.
“I’ve wrestled with, more than anything else over the last 36 hours, one fundamental question: Why is the man who killed George Floyd not in jail?” said Frey, who is white.
He later added: “I saw no threat. I saw nothing that would signal that this kind of force was necessary.”
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Wednesday spoke out on Floyd’s death, saying “being black in America cannot be a death sentence.”
“As a white elected official, I feel a special responsibility to speak out today and to own that obligation that I have to shape public policy in a more equitable direction,” Pritzker said at a COVID-19 briefing in East St. Louis in downstate Illinois. “Being black in America cannot be a death sentence. But it is. And it’s dangerous to pretend otherwise.”
The Democratic governor said something must be done to “change that reality to make it so that men like George Floyd are not killed on a street corner gasping for air in broad daylight, one moment alive, and the next moment, gone.
“People deserve to breathe,” Pritzker said.
Pritzker noted the events have happened in the midst of a pandemic that has already disproportionately impacted people of color.
“This moment must become a call of action to Illinoisans, for Americans, to see the humanity in every person, no matter their race, their religion, their socioeconomic status, or their sexual orientation,” Pritzker said. “To George Floyd, to his family, may his memory be for a blessing.”
The day after the death of Floyd, who lost his job as a restaurant bouncer during the pandemic, Chauvin and three other officers were fired.
Protesters marched more than 2 miles Tuesday to the police precinct in that part of the city, with some skirmishing with officers in riot gear who fired tear gas. Conflict erupted again Wednesday at the same precinct, with some protesters throwing rocks and bottles. News helicopter video appeared to show looting of stores, including a Target, a Cub Foods and an auto parts store, with no evident police intervention.
Speaking to reporters in Florida, President Donald Trump called the arrest in Minneapolis “a very, very sad event” and said his administration was going to “look at it.”