Police killings mount as trial progresses in Floyd case

Since testimony began March 29, at least 64 people have died at the hands of law enforcement nationwide, with Black and Latino people representing more than half of the dead.

MINNEAPOLIS — Just seven hours before prosecutors opened their case against Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd, a Chicago officer chased down a 13-year-old boy in a West Side alley and fatally shot him as he turned with his hands up.

One day later, at a hotel in Jacksonville, Fla., officers fatally shot a 32-year-old man, who, police say, grabbed one of their Tasers. The day after that, as an eyewitness to Floyd’s death broke down in a Minneapolis courtroom while recounting what he saw, a 40-yearold mentally ill man who said he was being harassed by voices was killed in Claremont, N.H., in a shootout with the state police.

On every day that followed, all the way through the close of testimony, another person was killed by the police somewhere in the United States.

The trial has forced a traumatized country to relive the gruesome death of Floyd beneath Chauvin’s knee. But even as Americans continue to process that case — and anxiously wait for a verdict — new cases of people killed by the police mount unabated.

Since testimony began March 29, at least 64 people have died at the hands of law enforcement nationwide, with Black and Latino people representing more than half of the dead. As of Saturday, the average was more than three killings a day.

The deaths, culled by the New York Times from gun violence databases, news media accounts and law enforcement releases, offer a snapshot of policing in

America. They testify not only to the danger and desperation that police officers confront daily but also to the split-second choices and missteps by members of law enforcement that can escalate workaday arrests into fatalities. They are the result of domestic violence calls, traffic stops gone awry, standoffs and chases. The victims often behave erratically, some suffering from mental illness, and the sight of anything resembling a weapon causes things to escalate quickly.

And their fallout has been wrenchingly familiar, from the graphic videos that so often emerge to the protests that so often descend into scu±es between law enforcement and demonstrators on streets filled with tear gas.

Across the spectrum, from community activists to law enforcement personnel, there is emotional and mental exhaustion — and the feeling that the nation cannot get this right.

“How many more losses must we mourn?” Miski Noor, co-executive director of the Minneapolis-based activist group Black Visions, said in a statement after the killing of Daunte Wright, 20, during a recent traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minn.

The pain of Floyd’s death “is still scarred into our minds and yet history continues to repeat itself,” the statement continued. “Our community has reached its breaking point.”