An investigation launched following the death of African-American George Floyd under the knee of a white police officer concluded on Wednesday that the tragedy was part of a context of generalized “racial discrimination” within the police force in Minneapolis. .
The police in this metropolis in the northern United States “use more force, arrest, search and verbalize black people more often than white people in comparable circumstances”, according to a report published by the State of Minnesota.
They “frequently use racist, misogynistic and disrespectful language” and “monitor black individuals or organizations on social networks, with no connection to criminal activity”, add the authors of this document.
These practices, explains the report, are “mainly linked to the culture of the institution”, which encourages “a paramilitary approach to security” and does not or little penalize police officers who slip.
To reach these conclusions, the services in charge of human rights in Minnesota carried out thousands of interviews, peeled mountains of minutes and internal documents.
The latter have in particular shown an overrepresentation of African-Americans in several types of police operations: while they represent only 19% of the inhabitants of the city, they are 54% of motorists arrested for roadside checks or 66% of people fined for disturbing public order.
In front of them, the police use their force more, and this can have fatal consequences: 13 of the 14 people killed by police between 2010 and 2022 in the city were of color, including the black forty-something George Floyd, suffocated on the 25th May 2020 by police officer Derek Chauvin.
After a very well-attended trial, he was sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison for “murder”. In September, he announced that he wanted to appeal and formally transmitted his arguments this week, which relate in particular to the refusal of the judge to disorient the hearings.
At the same time, procedural and training changes have been adopted by the Minneapolis police. But, according to the authors of the report, they remained superficial and the “lack of collective action” allowed the maintenance of a “problematic culture” in the city.
They therefore call on the mayor, the city council and the police chiefs to adopt “significant” reforms, starting with the disciplinary framework or the training of officers.
They do not, however, suggest either “dismantling” or “cutting police funds”, slogans that had flourished during the major anti-racism demonstrations of 2020 and have been buried, in Minneapolis as elsewhere, in the face of a sharp rise in homicides.
