On Wednesday, the family of #GeorgeFloyd filed a federal lawsuit against the city of #Minneapolis, and the four police officers involved in his death, claiming the police brutality against Floyd and those like him, is a “public health crisis” in the Black community.
Evidently, the only thing not scathed by the pandemic is the rampant racism, discrimination, and police brutality that has escalated over the past several months amid the virus, including the murder of Floyd, who died at the hands of Derek Chauvin, a white police officer who kneeled his knee into Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on May 25. Chauvin has since been arrested and is currently in jail, awaiting his fate.
“It was not just the knee of officer Derek Chauvin on George’s Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, but it was the knee of the entire Minneapolis Police Department on the neck of George Floyd that killed him,” attorney Ben Crump said. “The City of Minneapolis has a history of policies, procedures, and deliberate indifference that violates the rights of arrestees, particularly Black men, and highlights the need for officer training and discipline.” Crump is also calling the multiple killings of Black people in America a “public health crisis” that has disproportionately affected people of color, just like the coronavirus.
The recent string of events, specifically Floyd’s death, is what he claims to be the “tipping point for policing in America.”
The lawsuit has been filed in the US District Court of the District of Minnesota and calls out the critical problems of policies, including police training and the city’s awareness and “ratification” of a “culture of racism and bad behavior” within the department.
“This was nothing new for the city of Minneapolis,” Crump told reporters, mentioning the “deliberate indifference” of elected officials to police brutality, and refers to the fact that there was no immediate reaction from the city. “This was torture,” Crump said. “Why do you think the George Floyd killing galvanized people around the globe? It is because he was literally tortured to death, not in a third world country, but here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the United States of America in 2020.”
Crump points out the problem with officers’ training on how to use neck restraints by the city, which claimed they were an “authorized form of non-deadly force,” a lie that has allowed officers to operate under it. The use of the restraint is deadly, and the city would have to be blind not to realize this. Apparently, the move has been used since 2012 on 428 people, causing 14% to go unconscious and linked to fatalities before Floyd’s death.
The lawsuit also slams the department’s negligence when it comes to how it handles the discipline of officer complaints. Chauvin had 17 complaints, but there is no evidence the Internal Affairs Department ever followed through on their investigations of them.
Furthermore, it claims that probationary officers like Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng, who were both involved that tragic day, were not allowed to question their supervisor during the ordeal.
Although the lawsuit does not specify the amount of damages the family is seeking, we know that the primary goal is to prevent more deaths like Floyd’s by making the fallout “financially prohibitive” for Minneapolis and to set an example for all other cities.
“This is an unprecedented case; with this lawsuit, we seek to create a precedent,” Crump said and believes if the city’s policies were clear in the first place, “we would not be here today.”
#JusticeForGeorgeFloyd
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