Tensions are spreading across the country after the death of George Floyd.
Minneapolis remained under tension on Friday after a third night of looting, vandalism and arson, including that of a police station.
Will the arrest of the police officer implicated in the death of George Floyd be enough to bring down the anger? “Former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin has been charged by the Hennepin County District Attorney’s Office with murder (3rd degree) and manslaughter,” announced Friday, prosecutor Mike Freeman, while the release of the police officer, already removed from his post, aroused incomprehension.
The national guard
In images that have gone viral, we see him tackle a 46-year-old African-American to the ground on Monday, keeping his knee on his neck for long minutes, despite his pleas. “I can not breath anymore”, George Floyd worries about this recording. This basketball enthusiast, described by his relatives as a “gentle giant”, was suspected of having wanted to sell a fake 20 dollar bill. His death sent shock waves across the planet and a deluge of outraged reactions, from Joe Biden to Barack Obama. Minneapolis no longer sleeps, sinking day after day into an insurrectionary climate
500 soldiers of the National Guard are now deployed there, at the request of the Democratic governor of the state, Tim Walz. They “will offer support to civil authorities, for as long as they are requested, in order to ensure the safety of persons and property”, says a press release.
Tensions in Louisville
“When the looting begins, the shooting begins”, warned him, Donald Trump, a message perceived as a call to open fire on the rioters. A sign that the situation is increasingly escaping the authorities, a CNN journalist, Omar Jimenez, and his team were arrested Friday morning live in Minneapolis, before being released a few hours later. The news channel immediately raised the fact that the arrested journalist was black.
Not enough to appease the anger that is spreading across the country, in Los Angeles, Memphis, Denver or Chicago, reviving the gaping wounds of racial discrimination. An angry crowd gathered and shots were fired Thursday night in Louisville, Kentucky, where Breonna Taylor, a young black woman, was shot dead at her home in March, her lawyer implicating, there, too, the police.
George Floyd’s death “is the latest in a long line of murders of unarmed African Americans by American police and vigilantes”, on Wednesday condemned the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet.
1,004 people were killed by police in the United States in 2019, estimates Washington Post, taking into account only gun deaths. According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States relayed by The world in 2019, one in a thousand black people can expect to die in a police intervention. With this chilling precision delivered by a sociologist at Rutgers University (New Jersey): in Uncle Sam’s country, a black man has more “chance” of dying during contact with the police than of winning scratch games.
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