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Category: Eric Garner

  • New Study Shows More Than Half of Police Killings Have Gone Uncounted Since 1980

    Police in riot gear force people off a street as they protest the killing of Andrew Brown Jr. on April 27, 2021, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

    New research appears to confirm what Black Lives Matter activists and abolitionist organizers have said for years: There is a crisis of police-perpetrated killings in the United States that has gone underreported for decades, and people of color (and Black people especially) are most at risk.

    Deadly police violence has long been a major public health crisis, but an estimated 17,000 deaths caused by police went missing from federal public health data over the past four decades, according to a new study published by a team of researchers in The Lancet, a leading medical journal. The study found that Black people are 3.5 times more like to be killed by police than white people, and Latinx and Indigenous people are also killed at disproportionate rates.

    The study also suggests that local sheriffs, coroners, medical examiners and police themselves may play a role in skewing federal fatality data that obfuscates the severity of the police violence crisis. According to the team’s calculations, 55.5 percent of deaths caused by police were not reported as such between 1980 and 2018, including nearly 60 percent of cases where the victim was Black.

    “It’s incredibly naive to assume that it is all just by happenstance, that it is just a coincidence that they are listed [under] another cause of death,” said Amara Enyia, policy and research coordinator for the Movement for Black Lives, in an interview.

    The findings bolster the movement to disarm, defund and even abolish the police that grew out of the uprisings that followed the high-profile killings of unarmed Black people in recent years, from Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014 to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others in 2020.

    Nationally, the study found that rates of deadly police violence and the racial disparities within them have remained stable since 1990 or increased despite reform efforts. Activists have long argued that police “reform” has never prevented police killings, and the public resources afforded to police departments should be re-invested in disadvantaged communities and public health approaches to safety.

    Police violence has created simmering tensions in communities of color for decades if not centuries, but the issue often flies under the radar in the national conversation until a particularly egregious killing sparks an uprising. Along with persistent racism within the U.S. legal system and media, the new research suggests that the systematic underreporting of deaths caused by police and suppression of quality public health data may be partially to blame.

    “Unfortunately, you have these headline cases that tend to put more of a spotlight on these deep systemic issues that we face, issues that there have been attempts to call attention to, but for numerous reasons they don’t gain traction until you get, for example, the murder of George Floyd or Mike Brown for any number of reasons,” Enyia said.

    To conduct the study, a team of researchers compared three independent databases that track more recent police killings with the National Vital Statistics System, the federal database of births and deaths, and used data analysis to project discrepancies between the independent and government data back in time. Nonprofits and newsrooms began tracking police killings after the deaths of Brown and Garner, and journalists have noted for years the gaps between their data and what authorities report.

    The study draws on previous research to explain the massive gap between the actual number of people killed by police and the number of deaths officially attributed to police violence. In many cases, a medical examiner or coroner simply fails to mention police involvement on a death certificate, or the death was incorrectly coded when entered into the federal dataset.

    There are “substantial conflicts of interest” within the system for investigating and recording deaths, the authors write, including “the fact that many medical examiners and coroners work for or are embedded within police departments.” In 2011, 22 percent of respondents in a national survey of medical examiners reported that they faced pressure from an elected official or appointee to change the cause or manner of death on a death certificate.

    The study also acknowledges that policing and the criminal legal system in the U.S. has a long history of anti-Black racism, and like Black revolts of the past, police at all levels of government were called to put down the uprisings and protests of 2020 by force.

    “If half of the cases are going unaccounted for, that minimizes the scope and severity of police killings in this country, and I think that tracks with a lot of the narratives that came out last year that attempted to minimize the significance of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, and reduce them to individual unfortunate cases,” Enyia said.

    For example, former President Donald Trump attempted to downplay the uprisings against police last summer by claiming that more white people are killed by police than Black people. With this statement, Trump essentially manipulated data to push his preferred narrative.

    A larger number of white people are killed by police because there is a larger population of white people in the U.S., but studies show that Black people are shot and killed by police at twice the rate of whites. The racial disparity is even more pronounced in cases where the victim was unarmed and posted a minimal threat to police.

    “There are multiple systems at play that can perpetuate certain narratives or make sure that certain narratives don’t get the light of day, because they are in collaboration with each other is one way to put it,” Enyia said.

    Enyia also noted that the manipulation of data to fit certain narratives about crime and violence has parallels in the media, where journalists often report claims made by police departments as fact without determining whether these claims are true. These narratives built on manipulated information and faulty data — including the systematic underreporting of deaths caused by police violence — directly shape public perception and policymaking.

    “If those numbers are accounted for, it can change the narrative in a way that pushes for the kind of systemic changes that the Movement for Black Lives and so many other people who came out into the streets last year have been pushing for,” Enyia said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Derek Chauvin’s Lawyers Are Falsely Implying That Drugs Killed George Floyd

    A poster with George Floyd's picture and a sign reads that "I Can't Breathe" hang from a security fence outside the Hennepin County Government Center on March 30, 2021, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

    Drugs have long been used to justify racist police-perpetrated violence, and the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin for the alleged murder of George Floyd on a Minneapolis street corner last May is, thus far, no different.

    In his opening statement in a Minneapolis courtroom on Monday, Chauvin’s defense attorney Eric J. Nelson spoke at length about Floyd’s health problems and drug use in a clear attempt to cast doubt on the prosecution’s central argument: Floyd was killed because Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes as Floyd pleaded for mercy and gasped, “I can’t breathe.”

    The prosecution saw this coming from miles away. Attempts by Chauvin’s defense to blame the victim began shortly after Floyd was handcuffed and killed in police custody — an alleged murder that was captured on video before sparking mass protests against racist police violence in Minneapolis and across the nation. As Floyd struggled for life under Chauvin’s knee, another officer reportedly turned to the crowd and said, “This is why you don’t do drugs, kids.”

    “You will learn that [Floyd] did not die from a drug overdose, he did not die from an opioid overdose,” lead prosecutor Jerry Blackwell told jurors in his opening statement.

    Indeed, multiple medical experts have dismissed the idea that Floyd died from an overdose. Floyd lived with opioid addiction and had the opioid fentanyl in his system — a fact Chauvin’s defense immediately seized on — but Floyd’s death in no way resembled an opioid overdose, which renders a victim unconscious. Floyd struggled and pleaded for his life. Two separate autopsies found that Floyd died by homicide because his heart stopped as officers compressed his neck and chest.

    According to the prosecution, Floyd no longer appeared to be breathing during the final three minutes that Chauvin knelt on his neck. Both the police and the paramedics who later arrived were equipped with naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal drug, but there is no evidence that naloxone was administered to Floyd, according to The Washington Post.

    Darnella Frazier, an eyewitness who took the famous video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd, told the court on Tuesday that she saw “a man terrified, scared, begging for his life.” In her testimony, Frazier said bystanders urged Chauvin to check Floyd’s pulse, but the former officer continued kneeling on his neck until paramedics arrived.

    “If anything, he actually was kneeling harder,” Frazier said.

    It may take weeks for the court to sift through all the evidence in a case that is widely seen as a litmus test for the criminal legal system’s ability — or inability — to hold cops accountable, but judging by Monday’s opening statements, it’s not just former officer Chauvin who is on trial. The jury is examining another casualty of the war on drugs and the racist police violence it foments.

    Nelson’s strategy is to undercut the facts of the case and convince at least one juror that murder and manslaughter charges cannot be proven beyond a “reasonable doubt,” the legal standard of proof in criminal cases that Nelson repeatedly mentioned in his opening statement. To do so, Nelson is attempting to use to Chauvin’s advantage all of the social stigma that stems from drug criminalization, especially when the drug user is a poor Black man.

    Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a group opposed to the drug war, said suspected involvement with drugs — whether real or perceived — has long been used as a “cover for law enforcement to harass, inflict violence upon and even kill Black, Latinx and Indigenous people.”

    “We know exactly what killed George Floyd. It’s the systems that have been created through the parasitic relationship between policing, the drug war and racism,” Frederique said in a statement. “These systems empower officers like Derek Chauvin to operate with impunity, snuff out Black life and attempt to avoid any and all accountability.”

    People of color and Black men especially are targeted by police for drug searches and arrests: Black people were arrested for drugs at a rate more than two times that of white people in 2016, according to the Vera Institute of Justice. When to comes to arrests for suspicion of a crime — when a person is arrested for no specific offense and released without formal charges — Black people are arrested at a rate more than five times that of whites. Police often use suspicions about drugs to stop, harass and arrest people of color, and Black men in particular.

    Every police interaction or arrest — even over the most trivial matters — comes with the threat of escalation, injury and death, and we’ve seen this over and over in deadly cases of police violence. The police-perpetrated killings of both Eric Garner and Michael Brown, two Black men, began with an initial interaction that escalated from a call about tobacco products. A store clerk called the police on Floyd because he bought a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit bill. Breonna Taylor was gunned down by police in Louisville during a botched drug raid on a house where no drugs were found.

    The movement to defund the police and defend Black lives that filled the streets last summer seeks to decriminalize drugs and reduce or eliminate police interactions with the public. Activists see a direct link between the war on drugs, the violent policing of Black and Brown communities, and the brutal killings of Floyd, Taylor and many others.

    In the trial of Chauvin, the defense will attempt to use Floyd’s drug use to justify the violence that led to Floyd’s death and cast doubt on whether Chauvin killed Floyd, even though it was Chauvin who knelt on Floyd’s neck for those infamous nine minutes and 29 seconds. If jurors reject Chauvin’s lawyers’ argument, they will also be rejecting the oppressive logic of the drug war, which continues to give police the power to dehumanize and abuse the most vulnerable among us.

    “Until we dispense with the notion that people involved with drugs — or even thought to be involved with drugs — are not guaranteed the same right to dignity and life, we will continue to fight,” Frederique said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.