By now most of America has seen the heinous video of Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd. Regardless of George Floyd’s behavior before that time, Derek Chauvin acted with depraved indifference and committed manslaughter and that is what Prosecutors in Minneapolis have charged him with.
However, the prosecutor adding the charge of felony murder is a mistake. There is no proof with the evidence seen so far that Chauvin intended to kill George Floyd, or that he killed him because he was a black man and that he hated blacks. But rather just as the charges state, there was certainly depraved indifference on the part of Chauvin which lead to Mr. Floyd’s death.
Now that we have established clearly what Derek Chauvin did was wrong – we need to also address what George Floyd did that was wrong. He resisted being placed in the police car. He claimed he was claustrophobic. Regardless of being claustrophobic or not, regardless of whether the charges he was being arrested for or not were valid, George Floyd should have obeyed the officers and he did not. George Floyd would be alive today, hundreds of police officers across the nation would not have been injured by violent protestors and many businesses would still be standing today that sadly are not.
With all that being said I am going to say something similar to what I have said before about the COVID 19 crisis.
The greatest loss here is not the life of George Floyd, but rather it is the loss of perspective in this nation. And that loss of perspective has led to a loss of trust in law enforcement and when we loose trust in loss enforcement our society will fall into anarchy.
So now let’s put George Floyd’s death in a perspective.
Out of 375 million interactions that police in the United States have with U.S. Citizens each year, approximately 1000 people are killed by police. So, leaving out Hispanic and unknown here are the numbers according to Statista.com :
Year White Black
2017 457 223
2018 399 209
So, as we can see more whites are killed by police each year than blacks.
But then of course we need to address the population difference. Blacks only make up 13 percent of the population in the United States so those numbers in comparison to whites killed by police should be much smaller if all things were equal. But all things are not equal when it comes to the rate at which whites and blacks commit crimes. The reason for the higher number of blacks killed relative to their small population size is because blacks disproportionately commit far more crime that whites relative to their population.
Black males, who make up only 6 percent of America’s population, commit almost half of all murders, robberies and rapes in the United States. So, it is a very simple math equation. When you have a certain ethnic group that commits a disproportionate amount of the crimes in a country it is only logical that you will also see a disproportionate number of arrests and killings of that same group by police.
George Floyd’s death was an injustice and officer Derek Chauvin should be put on trial and convicted for depraved indifference and manslaughter and receive the maximum penalty under the law for those crimes.
But using this incident of this bad cop, and perhaps the officers around him who did nothing to help, to paint a picture that we have a problem with police brutality in America is also an injustice. It is an injustice against those who risk their lives each day to protect our society from the threat of lawlessness and anarchy.
We do not have a police problem in this country, we have a black culture problem. And until we accept this reality our country will continue to tear itself apart. We need to show proper respect and love for the 99 percent of police who perform their duties with honor while dealing with the less than one percent of cops who abuse their positions as law enforcement officials.