On the murder of #GeorgeFloyd by uniformed police officers in Minnesota:
Having been in the US for 20 years now, my personal experience is that police across the US are in general infinitely polite and tolerant of white-skinned people.

White-skinned people can talk themselves out of a traffic ticket, always have the benefit of doubt and have the privilege of a civilized and decent interaction. Any other skin color will face rudeness, intransigence, no compromise and in case of African Americans deadly force.

This is not to say good policemen don’t exist, they do, they are fair and polite to all, but if you encounter a bad policeman, the chances are that the bad side of him will evident to people who are not white. White people will get the best face of the bad cop.

Over the years, policemen have gotten away with murder in the US for a few reasons. One is that their lawyers have always been able to raise the bogey of feeling “threatened”, they shot their guns because they felt threatened, bad judgement call MeLord but not racism.

This has been the defense even when the person dead didn’t have a gun. It was always “he seemed threatening”, “how would we know he didn’t have a gun?” Which brings me to the second reason: police unions, which are extremely poweful.

In this case of #GeorgeFloyd, there is not even that fig leaf of “I thought he had a gun”. For the alleged crime of passing a fake twenty dollar bill, a man who served as security in a restaurant, was choked to death by a 200 plus lb man sitting on his neck.

There was no threat perception, the man was lying on the ground, the policeman knew he was being recorded, so did the other policemen and yet they did nothing. This isn’t an individual bad apple, this is classic institutional racism.

All of them knew that the uniform protects them from any consequence. It’s obvious to the people recording that the man is being killed. They shout it out. It goes on for minutes. This isn’t an over in one second gun shot based on a sudden movement. It’s a guy lying immobile.

The solution to this is to not only charge the police officer who sat on the victim’s neck as a murderer but all other cops at the scene as accessories to murder. This the Minnesota justice system has not done. Firing them is nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Because assaulting a uniformed official is a felony, non-uniformed people who saw #GeorgeFloyd could not do anything, they could only watch and shout. Only his fellow officers could have stepped in. They chose not to. If this isn’t accessory to murder then I don’t know what is.

If systemic racism has to be struck at, justice has to come down with full force on those who were part of the system, at the scene of the crime, saw a murder and did nothing because of the fraternity of the uniform. One is a racist murderer, what about the rest?

The uniform confers great power, but it has to come with responsibility. My sense of outrage is how come the rest get away literally with murder? As to who loses their job, that should be up the entire management chain of the cops, because they have failed too.

In conclusion, if things are to change, those who wear the uniform need to be given the message that the standards for them are stricter, not lower, than for normal people.