Calls to Reform the Police Raise Everyone United States but the task looks daunting as long as the police are protected by their unions and the judiciary, which have long allowed a strong feeling of impunity to settle in their ranks.
Since the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American asphyxiated by a white policeman two weeks ago in Minneapolis, initiatives abound to tackle police violence, especially those targeting the black minority.
Thousands of protesters demand cuts to law enforcement budgets, Congressmen want “Hold the police to account” and the Minneapolis city council wants to dismantle city police to get everything flat.
Because the ordeal experienced by George Floyd is far from being an isolated case. U.S. police killed 1,098 people in 2019, a quarter of whom were black, while African Americans make up less than 13% of the population, according to the website mappingpoliceviolence.
In comparison, the French police kill an average of 20 people a year. Much of the difference is due to the country’s population size, but also to the spread of firearms in the United States, which increases the feeling of insecurity for American police. Some 135 officers died in service last year, according to the fund created in their memory.
So they have the right to shoot if they have “Reasonable apprehension of imminent danger” for them or others. But in the event of even flagrant excess, sanctions are extremely rare.
Administratively, the police are often protected by collective agreements which “Make it more difficult” the prosecutions, underlines the militant project checkthepolice.org which has scoured the agreements signed by the police unions with more than 80 major American cities.
One, in force in Minneapolis, allowed Derek Chauvin, the agent who killed George Floyd, to continue his career for almost 20 years despite 18 complaints of abuse, the details of which remain covered by the secret.
A fortnight ago, a staggering detail, his hands were in his pockets when he smothered the handcuffed 40-something man, kneeling on his neck for almost nine minutes. Charged for murder, he appeared for the first time before a judge on Monday without showing any particular emotion.
Not friendly
His arrest only came five days after the tragedy, and he was initially charged with manslaughter only. The charges were not reclassified until the local prosecutor was removed from the case.
Local prosecutors are “Very reluctant to charge the police because they work with them on a daily basis”, but also because elected by the population, “They want to win the lawsuits”, Philip Stinson, a former police officer who became a law professor, told AFP. Now, these “Files are very difficult” because jurors or judges “Don’t like to question a decision made in a second by an agent during a potentially violent encounter”he says.
Another obstacle: “The people who accuse the police are not always the friendliest, it can be drug traffickers” for which jurors have little empathy, says David Schultz, a law professor in Minnesota.
As a result, in the past 15 years, only 110 police have been charged with homicide after killing a person in the line of duty and only five have been convicted of murder, notes Philip Stinson, who compiles the data.
Aware of the limits of criminal justice at the state level, a law of the 19th century provided for the possibility of claiming compensation before federal courts. But the U.S. Supreme Court has made this option almost impractical by saying that the police must have raped “A clearly established law” to be sentenced.
Concretely, if they commit an abuse that has never been tried before, they are almost certain to be whitewashed. A man, bitten by a police dog while sitting on the ground with his hands in the air, thus lost to justice because the only precedent was that of a man lying on the ground.
Nearly 200 elected congressmen, mainly Democrats, announced Monday their intention to legislate to put an end to this “Immunity”. Beyond that, they want to tackle the racial prejudices which underlie part of the actions of the police with, in particular, compulsory training in the fight against prejudice or the creation of a register of police blunders.
But their text is unlikely to end up in the Senate, where the Republicans are the majority.
And even if it were adopted, the national level has little weight over the 18,000 or so autonomous police entities (municipal police, county sheriffs, state patrols, etc.) which have their own rules for recruitment and training. , authorized practices…
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